


Supersymmetry

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: London Spy
Genre: Alex lives, Discussion, Established Relationship, Intimacy, M/M, Magical Realism, Philosophy, Slow Burn, akashic records, collective conscience theory, negotiation, plot rewrite, quantum physics, the mundane parts of life that make it so amazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-14 22:35:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5761453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Alex holds his hands in Danny’s hair, placing a kiss against his brow. It will have to suffice as apology for now, surely the first of many. He doesn’t wait a moment more than that, however, despite how badly he wants to feel Danny close to him, despite the frequency at which they vibrate together. Their waves must propagate faster, first, rising in pitch before they can settle to low and comfortable quiet.</i>
</p><p>Alex fakes his own death and he and Danny leave London to finish his work elsewhere.</p><p>A story of a scientist and a romantic, speaking different languages and saying the exact same thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GulliverJ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GulliverJ/gifts).



> This was a huge challenge, especially for the entirely science-illiterate (Whiskey). Blood rocked this story, and it was such a trip and the best kind of ride to let Blood lead the way.
> 
> For a very good friend, who understands much more here than we ever will, and who is still always patient with us when we ask him questions he probably has no time to explain. Thank you, darling, this one's for you.

It seems a fucking farce that the flat is still the same as it was before.

The cup of tea Danny left in the sink, now cold, remains just where it was left that morning.

Two weeks before, they agreed to share a weekend away, to go hiking in the country.

Two weeks before, now a lifetime ago, before the scent of his lover’s remains burned itself into his nose and cheap police station coffee bittered his tongue.

What’s he meant to do now? Go to bed, to work tomorrow? Wash the stupid mug in the sink and smoke another cigarette? Every time he blinks, there’s scarlet coils behind his eyelids. Every time he opens them he sees pale blue eyes watching him, surrounded by milky skin.

A sob chokes him but his eyes remain dry. There’s nothing left and the attempt to wring himself out more yields only a throbbing headache. Somewhere inside him, a strange little tube hidden where it shouldn’t have been hopefully begins to work its way free. Somewhere in that, he hopes, is an answer to his questions.

He wants to know why.

He wants to know how.

But just as much, he wants to know in what way he’s meant to ever rest again when the man with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life is dead, rather than lying in his bed beside him. No one will be able to answer that for him. There’s no one there to tell him how to make himself breathe.

How long was he there alone? Danny’s fingers fumble against the light switch and fill the room with sallow light. Why hadn’t he just forced his way in? Had Alex called for him, hoped he would come? A sob cuts short as the mattress creaks and a spectre stands before him.

“Danny,” Alex whispers.

Danny turns the light off again and leans against the doorframe, one hand up to press to his eyes to cement the image there. Just one more time. The phantom of a memory. A conjuring brought forth from an exhausted mind.

“Danny, will you turn on the light?”

“I want you to be here,” Danny whispers. “I want you to be here so badly and I know you're not. I know you won't be when I turn the light on again. Let me keep you here, in the dark with me, just a little longer.”

Every click of heels against the floor cinches his lungs tighter. He’s done enough drugs to know how readily perception can be altered and feel as if it were real. He hurts enough to know that this isn’t, that it can’t be, that what he has left of Alex is a strange device and warped remnants scalded into his psyche.

“I’ll still be here if you turn on the lights,” Alex says.

“I hope you won’t. If you are then I’ll know I’ve cracked completely.”

“Can I touch you?”

“No. No. You can’t because you aren’t really here, no matter how…” Danny’s words jerk short in a sob, caught against the palm of his hand. “No matter how badly I want you to be.”

Eyes closed, he shakes his head, and tries not to remember how Alex’s fingers felt in his hair, stroking softly through his curls. A strand slips loose and brushes his cheek, and Danny flinches backward, flipping the light on again. Alex’s fingers hold in the air where Danny stood a moment before, his gaze the same piteous thing as when he insisted to Danny on the street that he didn’t want anyone else. Didn’t need anyone else.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Alex whispers.

Danny blinks. His chest aches with how heavy the breath he holds feels. A breath he has held every time he inhaled, to feel the burn in his lungs as Alex would have in that box. Over and over. Never holding long enough to feel his vision darken.

“How are you here?” Danny asks him. “How are you - I saw you dead. I saw -”

Alex steps back as Danny comes forward, but when the step is unsteady he grasps him by the arms and watches as lines darken across Danny’s brow and he makes a pained sound. “Not everything we see is as it seems to be,” Alex tells him.

“No,” Danny says, shaking his head. He leans helpless against Alex’s chest when he strokes through Danny’s hair again. “No, I saw you.”

“It wasn’t me, Danny, it was -”

“Alistair Turner is dead,” Danny whispers, but when he bucks away Alex doesn’t let him go, strong arms secured firm around his shoulders, lips parted against his hair.

“Yes.”

Danny makes another sound, a pained thing, and presses his fists against Alex’s chest in lieu of clinging to him. Because he will, he will if he starts and he will not let him go.

“You’re not making sense,” Danny whispers softly, and he can feel himself tremble, can feel the sleepless nights and lack of food and too much gin and too little coffee pulse through him in reminder of a death. Of mourning.

Not this.

“Alistair Turner died,” Alex says. “The perception of him, the impression, differing boundary conditions…”

“Don’t,” Danny hisses. “Don’t try to explain this with physics, Alex, don't - I had to see you. I had to. The trunk and the attic and - and I had to go through losing you! I had to go through that!” Danny squirms free and looks at Alex with as much anger as he can muster through the rising tide of anguish, the tiny flicker of hope beyond that.

“I had to, and now you're here and I...” Danny whines, low, and slaps his palms against Alex’s chest, again, again, hard enough to hurt before he curls his hands into fists and hits like that instead. When Alex catches his wrists Danny cries out and freezes, shaking against him. Alex folds his arm around his shoulders and this time Danny goes, sobbing against his shoulder, fingers curled in his sweater so hard he threatens to pull the stitches loose.

Alex breathes against his hair, slow and steady, for as long it takes before Danny’s quaking sobs shudder to match Alex’s breath. The dampness of deep-dredged tears soaks against him, darkening steel-grey wool to black.

“I’ll explain everything,” Alex tells him. “But there isn’t time now. Did you check the battery?”

“Yes.”

“You left the computer? Did you take what was there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I swallowed it.”

Alex blinks, and for a moment he’s quiet. That Danny in his intuition was clever enough to take from a single subtle hint what Alex needed him to do is remarkable. That his foresight spanned further still and he sought to hide the drive where no one could reach it tugs at Alex with as much intensity as Danny’s nails catch against his jumper.

“How did you know to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Danny says, shaking his head. “Instinct. I don’t know.”

“Bring your bag. You don’t have a computer, a phone -”

“Alex,” Danny protests. He laughs, bitterly, that he says his name at all, that Alex is there and watching him with his plaintive grey gaze. Not flat and lifeless as it was before. Not dulled lightless, but entirely alive. Danny feels cold all over, blood draining. The room swerves unsteady as it does after a night of dancing or chemsex and closing his eyes only worsens it.

“If you do, leave them. We have to go.”

“Go where?” He sighs, licking his lips and raising an eyebrow before opening his eyes slowly. He feels drunk. He feels so tired he can’t stand, let alone go anywhere.

“Away,” Alex says, stroking Danny’s hair from his forehead. “Anywhere, away.”

“Will you come with me?”

“Yes, together.”

Danny laughs, weak and wet and nods, shrugging, leaning in against Alex again, just to feel him there.

“Okay. Let's go. I don’t need anything, I have everything, let’s go.”

Alex holds his hands in Danny’s hair, placing a kiss against his brow. It will have to suffice as apology for now, surely the first of many. He doesn’t wait a moment more than that, however, despite how badly he wants to feel Danny close to him, despite the frequency at which they vibrate together. Their waves must propagate faster, first, rising in pitch before they can settle to low and comfortable quiet.

For the moment, Alex and Alistair have been compactified. The newspapers will couple them closer together. Only a handful in the world will know the truth. Alex can’t be certain that when his actions are discovered, the makeshift manifold he created won’t be subject to source separation.

He will not wait to find out. 

They can’t stop now.

Danny’s bag, still packed for their weekend away, rests over Alex’s shoulder. Danny’s lighter flickers and fails in his shaking grip. Only when they’re a few blocks clear of the flat does Alex speak again.

“Out of London,” he says, head ducked. “Out of England. The more checkpoints we can avoid, the better. Croatia seems best.”

“Croatia,” Danny laughs, because if he doesn’t he’s sure he’ll cry again.

“No extradition laws,” Alex explains, watching with curiosity as Danny laughs even harder.

He’ll become hysterical if he can't stifle it, and so Danny bites his knuckles hard and snorts against them as they walk briskly along the narrow streets.

“What are you?” He asks finally, catching his breath and concentrating on the steps he takes. In time, out of time with Alex's, over and over. “I mean, faking death. Mysterious _things_ in your laptop battery. Two weeks you were gone, and your name...”

“Please Danny, just trust me.”

Danny laughs again, folding his arms over his middle hard, cigarette still unlit but between his lips regardless. For comfort maybe.

“I do,” he replies, almost bitterly.

Alex stops, attention darting quickly from lamppost to lamppost, to the corner of the quiet residential street and back to the other. Danny’s sneakers slap to a halt and he turns, arms spread in question before they drop to his sides. How can Alex explain, here and now, the years that have lead to this? The lifetime, shaped and formed, that created the singularity of this moment and his own personal paradox of being both alive and dead, in the few remaining hours before Pandora’s box is finally opened?

If he expects Danny to trust him, he has to trust Danny too.

Alex steps closer and reels Danny in by his wrist, a hand in his hair and lips warm against his ear.

“I worked for MI6, developing something that they want - and you saved. They sent someone to kill me, but I caught him first. And if I don’t go now, right now, they’re going to finish what they started,” he whispers, drawing back just enough to seek over Danny’s features. He parts his lips with his tongue and shakes his head, a cold regret spreading his eyes wide.

“I shouldn’t have brought you into this,” Alex whispers.

Danny shakes his head again, brows furrowing in disbelief. There is a thin sheen of sweat across his upper lip and he’s shaking. He takes the cigarette in his fingers, broken now, and flicks it away before drawing his hand through his hair.

He nods. Huffs a breath and nods. 

“Just don’t leave me behind again. I’ll never forgive you if you do.”

Alex catches Danny’s fingers and he brings them to his mouth. Beseeching him for forgiveness, apologizing in touch the way he can’t in his clumsy and ill-fitting words. Alex knows that words matter to Danny, anyway, no matter that Alex isn’t capable with them. He whispers them against his hand.

“That’s what I should have done,” Alex says. “I should have just gone. But once I go, I can’t come back, and I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing you again. I’m sorry.”

Danny squirms, lips pressing together. He doesn’t push Alex away but he doesn’t relax. The words hurt. The entire day is overwhelming. The entire last few weeks with no contact.

“I’m angry,” Danny admits. “I’m angry at you, at - at everything. I don’t understand. I’m upset, and I’m - I’m tired, Alex, I missed you.”

“I missed you,” Alex promises him. “I couldn’t go and not...”

“Tell me later. Just don’t let me lose you again. If Croatia then… Croatia, I guess. I will go with you. But let's go.”

“Just for now,” Alex says as he follows after Danny, then outpaces him. “Just until the work is done.”

Danny doesn’t speak. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t look at Alex as he follows him to a non-descript sedan stashed in a carpark, and he doesn’t ask how it came to be there or why. As Alex slides Danny’s bag into the back seat, Danny looks out over London and wonders if perhaps this is what it means to be in love, rather than in love with the idea of love. A desire to spend one’s life with another whatever the circumstances, whatever their faults or failures, no matter how far away that life seems from picturesque imaginings.

He used to daydream of sharing a little house with him, outside London. Perhaps returning to finish his education while Alex went to work at the bank. Maybe they’d have a cat together, or a dog. Every morning Alex would run, and sometimes on the weekends they’d go out dancing together.

And then Alex died, and everything upturned.

Croatia, then, with a secret in his stomach and a former spy at his side, on the run from the Secret Intelligence Service.

When Danny finally breaks, Alex holds his hand.

Danny doesn’t let his hand go as the car speeds through towards Heathrow. He doesn't tell Alex that he doesn’t have his passport with him. He doesn’t say anything. He holds Alex’s hand and he presses his other to his eyes and he cries.

At the airport, Alex passes his passport to him and Danny takes it.

On the plane he sleeps, turning his face against Alex’s shoulder and curling as small as he can in his seat. Alex doesn’t sleep. He watches Danny beside him, cheek against his hair, and listens to his breathing steady. He slips their hands together and spreads his fingers to watch Danny’s match against his own.

There are so many ways this might have gone wrong; so many more in which it still could. Alex can hardly bring his thoughts to speed enough to begin processing them all, when every thought threads back to Danny at his side. He shouldn’t have asked him to come, let alone exposed him to such a gruesome sight and terrible sensation, pulling him unknowing into a complex field stacked manifold with tangled strings.

But their string seems so distinct, humming tachyon beneath the others. Danny must feel it too, in the way their fingers meet and their palms curve together. Why else would he have agreed to come, if he didn’t sense their supersymmetry?

“I love you,” Alex whispers against his hair, because it feels like the right thing to say. Danny stirs a little and nuzzles closer, and sleeps beneath Alex’s arm until they reach Zagreb.

He wakes without complaint. He goes without question. He accepts the coffee Alex presses into his hand with a sigh and a small smile. He holds Alex’s hand when he takes it in the car.

He only laughs when Alex leads him to a small block of flats and unlocks one with a well-used key. 

“Do you come here often?” Danny asks him, stepping in and finishing his now-cold coffee in one long drink.

Alex sets Danny’s bag to the bed, straightening to regard him. “No.”

“Just a joke,” Danny says, and after a moment to process, Alex nods, smiling a little.

“No,” he says again, anyway. “Once before this, to buy and furnish it. I’d hoped it would continue to accumulate dust, and I’d not have to concern myself with cleaning it.”

The flat can only be considered furnished by Alex’s definition of the word. One large room, with a kitchen demarcated only by a small counter separating it from the rest of the space. There is a wide bed, spread with tidy unwrinkled white sheets despite no one living here. A pale grey couch and a kitchen table with two chairs. A work desk. A set of dressers.

But it is spacious, with a tall vaulted ceiling and wooden rafters high overhead, and wide windows overlooking a terrace and the city beneath.

“This isn’t the only one you have, is it?”

“No,” Alex agrees. “There are four. This is the only one they don’t know about.”

Danny laughs again, but a little softer then. It's strange - he had always assumed that Alex truly did work a mundane and impossibly boring job in finance. He assumed his colleagues were older and drank tea from a thermos and went for walks in the countryside. 

He almost doesn’t want to ask what Alex truly does.

“What do I call you?” Danny asks after a moment. “I don’t even know who you are.”

Alex watches him, but doesn’t approach. He wants to push their hands together again - their mouths, their bodies - and let Danny feel the low and steady pulse that beats between them. He wants to feel it for himself again, so he knows it’s still there.

“You do,” Alex tells him. “You might be the only one who really does.”

“Your name isn’t Alex.”

“I hate the name Alistair,” he says. “It isn’t my name. I’ve always asked my friends, those I’ve had, to call me Alex.”

Danny doesn’t ask if needs to step outside to smoke. He doesn’t bother. He lights a long overdue cigarette and Alex says nothing, watching him breathe it in and curl it over his tongue.

“Alistair Turner is dead. You said so yourself.”

“He is,” Alex insists, before he shakes his head. “For now. At least, they think he is. They’ll figure it out, I’m sure they will, that it wasn’t me who wound up in the box but the man they sent.”

“What did you do?” Danny asks him, laughing softly. “Hell.”

He smokes quickly, folding the filter into his fist when he finds no ashtray to toss it into. He shrugs and paces slowly back and forth. He comes close enough to Alex to touch but he doesn’t touch him, not yet.

“Can you tell me what you did? What you made or wrote or created?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t,” Danny says, setting his cigarettes and the filter on the table and ignoring the look that Alex gives them. “Don’t do that right now. Not after you’ve just kidnapped me off to Croatia.”

“It would take hours to explain. Days to explain properly,” Alex answers, settling to the edge of the bed to remove his shoes. He scarcely has a lace untied before he’s pushed back by the same hand that left bruises on his chest, that grasped his shirt as if he’d never let him go, that pressed fingers between his own. Alex lifts his eyes to Danny, standing furious and pale before him.

“I had to see you dead. Two weeks thinking you were gone, and then I had to find you there, Alex…”

“Danny.”

“No,” he says. “The police, questioning me, showing me pictures that I thought were you, you, dead, the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I had to look at pictures of that room that didn’t… I had to listen to them tell me lies about you!”

“But you knew they were lies,” Alex says, hands on his knees, fingers curled. “How? You’ve just said you don’t know me. How could you know?”

Danny curses and brings a hand to his lips to wipe furiously there.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But I knew it wasn't you. I knew you could never - you didn’t...”

He turns on the spot, head in his hands for a minute before he sits down beside Alex and drops his arms to let his wrists hang limp against his knees.

“I can always tell a lie. I always could. I’d be with boys and know that - I knew if something I was taking was pure. And this, it's wrong, it was just wrong. It wasn’t you and I knew that. When you told me to trust you. When you told me you loved me. That is real, that is the truth and that is all I have to go on.”

Alex studies the lines shadowing Danny’s features and the dark circles beneath his eyes. He takes in the resilient porcelain glow across his cheeks, and the pale red flush of his lips. When he leans just enough to close the distance between them, Alex nuzzles softly from Danny’s temple up against his hairline, breathing him in.

For all the exhaustion, the smoke and the recycled air of their flight, Danny smells like summer warmth, and his sigh sounds as sweet as ripe strawberries. He dizzies Alex’s senses, honed and sharp as they are. In Danny’s presence, they muddle together in wavelengths of colors that have no names and strange angles of non-Euclidean geometries.

“Then you know me better than anyone else,” Alex whispers.

He kisses Danny’s cheek, coarse stubble catching rough against his lips.

“That,” Alex tells him, “is what I’ve tried to define. A series of algorithms to separate lies from truth. Lies that people don’t even know they tell themselves, lies they think are truths. A means to analyze an individual’s nature, behavior, patterns of thought and spread it out for anyone to see. For everyone to see.”

Danny shakes his head and laughs again, bringing a hand up to try to push Alex away. It's rare he needs the space but he needs it now. To breathe. To settle and understand and absorb all of this.

“You’re reducing human beings to a mathematical equation,” he says, when Alex doesn’t lean close again. “You’re assuming everything is predictable.”

“It is, statistically,” Alex tells him.

“Then what am I going to do now?” Danny asks him dryly, brow up as he presses his hands against the bed sheets. 

“This isn’t a means of premonition. That doesn’t exist, at least not yet. This is a statistical likelihood of -”

“Alex.” Danny licks his lips and ducks his head. He has nothing else to say. In the space of hours, mere hours, Alex has been killed and resurrected, lied about, changed, back in Danny’s arms and entirely not himself. He doesn’t know what to do.

He feels dizzy. He feels sick.

“I need to sleep. I just want to sleep.” Danny sighs. “You can - please don't go. Don't go again, okay? Please. But I need time to think I need to… process this. Give me that.”

“Of course,” Alex says. “Anything.”

“Not anything. Just sleep.”

Alex nods, motionless as Danny drags himself up along the bed. He’s still in the clothes he meant to wear on their weekend holiday, now much more than that. A thin scarf wrapped around enough times to be opaque. His sneakers, the rubber slowly peeling from canvas. With a sigh, Danny settles back, arm across his eyes, and Alex finishes removing his shoes before he stands again.

He goes to the window, and looks across across the red brick roofs to the spires of St. Stephen’s in the distance. With the sun rising behind them, he can make out no details, no fine points of architecture to give them particularity. But as with so many things in the universe, he can see their shape, the negative space their darkness forms against the sun. It’s enough to know their nature, and he doesn’t need more than that to be assured of where he stands.

Alex closes the drapes over every window, wooden floors creaking softly beneath his steps. When he circles back to the bed, Danny’s breath has already slowed, though not yet to sleeping. He rests a careful hand on Danny’s ankle and removes his shoes in gentle measured movements, setting them at the end of the bed.

When Danny doesn’t speak, Alex doesn’t either.

Alex wants to tell him that he loves him. He wants to tell Danny that he makes him weak. Logic and reason slip through his grasp when Danny’s hand is there instead, and he could not, even in the white-hot metallic singe of adrenaline, imagine a life worth living without him. All the things that Alex told himself he neither needed nor wanted - a partner, a friend, a lover - manifest in Danny as a singularity that he could no more defy than the beating of his heart.

He wants to tell him all of that.

Instead he gives Danny what he asked for - time and space to process. The couch is stiff against his back, the flat far too quiet. Alex measures his breath in variant rhythms, metronymic precision and off-beat tempos. When finally he finds one that eases him towards sleep, he realizes that it’s matched to Danny’s own.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“It is comforting to know none of us will ever be alone,” Danny says after a while. “Ever. Even if we try.”_
> 
> _“Alone, no,” Alex agrees after a moment. “But sharing space with particles isn’t much the same as with another person. Just because we cannot exist in a vacuum - we’d negate it just by doing so, but...” He stops himself, lips thinned together to staunch the flow of theory. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t be lonely.”_

Danny wakes with a shiver and turns to curl beneath the blankets, finding the bed empty but for himself. He can hear Alex breathing from across the room, still steady and slow, that gentle curl at a beginning of a snore that never comes to fruition by the end of each sigh.

Danny settles beneath the blankets until he warms again and watches the empty wall before him. This place is unlived in and unloved, empty of everything but their breath. But that's how it starts, isn’t it? Breath then life then experiences to fill it out and strengthen it?

He told Alex he wanted to spend the rest of his life with him - it wasn't a lie. Life takes work to cling to, death comes too easily, at every corner, but life… living takes effort and power. Living is hard.

Crawls from bed only when he needs to use the bathroom, Danny digs through his duffel for a hoodie. He swaps it with his coat, and makes his way back to the living room and the couch where Alex dozes. The street lights push through the thin-curtained windows to illuminate his face in stark oranges and blue shadows. He is lovely. Beautiful and alive. Danny watches his chest rise and fall over and over until he is satisfied he isn’t in a dream. Then he settles with crossed legs beside Alex and sets a hand to his cheek to gently wake him.

Alex remains still for a moment, a moment long enough that Danny makes a small sound. But with this note, singular and soft, Alex blinks sleepily awake - distant and then all at once aware. His lips part when he draws a breath, seeking over Danny’s features in the same disbelief Danny felt moments before.

They are here, together.

They are alive, together.

And for now they are safe, together.

Danny’s hair shines like oil in the dim lights, radiant and glittering gold that shadows to darkness in curls against pale skin. Alex leans up and kisses him. Seeking out plush lips beneath his own, from cheek to jaw to mouth, he grasps Danny gently by his hair and holds him near, no mind at all for the tension that came before, if only because it came before.

Danny kisses back, tense only at first before sighing out against Alex’s cheek and relenting gratefully to the kiss he thought he would never have again. He strokes Alex’s hair, and smiles when he makes that sweet little sound of delight, like a trilling hum.

When Danny pulls back he shifts to sit on his hip, hand still in Alex’s hair and forehead pressed to his.

“You didn’t bring toothpaste, did you? I forgot. You always remembered.”

Alex’s brows lift and he breathes out a sound that’s almost like a laugh.

“No,” Alex says, shaking his head but keeping close to Danny, so close it’s almost too much. “I didn’t bring anything. I brought you. That's all I need.”

Danny’s fingers fall against his wrist. Not unkindly, very gently, he lowers Alex’s hand from his hair and presses it against his chest. He yields a kiss, and then another, their lips touching with gentle clicks that penetrate the dark, hollow silence of this place in which they find themselves. When they part, it’s with a nuzzle turned against Alex’s cheek.

“And toothpaste,” Danny says, and this time, Alex does laugh.

Neither have phones. Neither have identification to get them. It remains to be seen whether or not the flat’s even wired for electricity, but Danny’s relieved to find that they at least have that when he switches on the small light beside the bed. Alex slips into his shoes and Danny his, as well.

“I have means,” Alex tells him, “for whatever we need.”

Danny doesn’t argue, and he doesn’t ask.

He pulls his coat back on atop his hoodie and keeps his hands deep in his pockets when they leave the flat on quick quiet feet. The supermarket is open late, and despite the dark, it isn't an ungodly hour. Danny takes a basket when they pass the door, and Alex takes another after him.

Usually, Danny shops alone. He likes it, the meditative shuffling through the aisles. He would push his headphones in and sail on by, returning home with everything they need and a lot more they didn't. Going together is novel. Shopping in a country where Danny doesn’t speak the language is just silly.

“We might have to go at a guess on some stuff,” Danny comments. “Or trust our noses.”

Alex regards Danny with a genuine amusement - no, a genuine pleasure, just to see him there beside. “I trust yours.”

“Will you stop?” Danny laughs. “You don’t have to be so bloody romantic all the time.”

A deep breath drawn and shoulders straightened, Alex takes the chiding as it’s intended, with good humor and warmth. The posh posturing that he held back in England seems unconstrained to that country. He still lifts his chin a little too high. He still looks down the long bridge of his nose a little too much.

Alex has never gone shopping with someone else before. To be perfectly frank, he could count on one hand the amount of times he’s done it for himself at all. He took advantage of services offered to him, whether by his upbringing or his employment, and rarely found himself wanting for anything in particular that could not be provided.

“Toothpaste,” he says. “We need toothpaste. And I need a brush.”

“Toilet paper,” Danny says. “There’s none there.”

“Perhaps some things for outside of the bathroom,” suggests Alex, and he can think of few moments in his life so satisfying as when Danny laughs. He hadn’t intended it to be a joke, but warmth spreads through him all the same. “You like tea in the morning.”

“And you take milk with yours,” Danny says, smiling. “No sugar.”

“No sugar,” Alex agrees. They find two types of tea. A small glass bottle of milk. To that they add toothpaste and soap, two fluffy towels. Danny insists on pudding. Alex buys some dry pasta, and sauce to go with it. Cheese, salt, pepper. Canned beans and a loaf of bread, baked earlier that day. Butter and jam. Shaving cream and condoms.

“I wonder when strawberries are in season here,” Danny murmurs, holding a jar of jam up to examine, though he has no idea what fruit is preserved within.

“Late spring,” Alex says. “Early summer. There’s a festival in May.”

Danny regards him at length, setting the jam slowly into his basket. “How do you know that?”

“Study, I suppose,” responds Alex, as though that says everything, though he can tell from Danny’s expression that it doesn’t. Lips parted by his tongue, Alex shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“You just know it.”

“I must have learned it sometime,” Alex says. “When I was studying Croatian, perhaps. That would make the most sense.”

“You speak Croatian?”

“Yes, a little.”

“Why?” Danny laughs, but it’s a patient laugh, flustered, and Alex feels his cheeks warm as they proceed down the aisle together.

“It’s something we’re expected to know, different languages and dialects. Once you’ve understood the core of them - Germanic, Slavic, Romantic, Arabic - it simply becomes variations of a common theme.”

“How many languages do you speak?”

“Passably, or fluently?”

Danny comes to a stop and Alex turns in the aisle - ill-lit by fluorescent lights reflecting from cheap tile beneath - to watch him press his fingers against the bridge of his nose and laugh into his palm. Alex draws a breath to apologize but holds it as Danny lifts a hand to quiet him, shaking his head once.

“When were you going to tell me any of this?”

Alex releases his held breath, brows raising. “I wasn’t.”

For a moment, Danny is quiet, his smile fades to something understanding and cool. He supposes it would be as much by choice as entirely outside of Alex’s control if he could reveal something. Anything. But he reveals it now. He admits his inability and unwillingness to before and he does now what he could not then. Regret and anger take too much energy, waste too much time. Danny can't bring himself to hold past untruths against him.

He walks up to Alex and past him and on to fresh produce with a slight cock of his hips as he goes, knowing Alex watches.

“I don’t speak any other languages,” Danny says, picking out some broccoli and cauliflower. He can make stir fry with them, and carrots and sweet peppers and chilis. Alex isn’t a fan of meat. Danny's grown used to cooking vegetarian. “I can’t play any instruments either. I tried playing guitar once, when I was very young. I was bloody awful.”

“Of course you were,” Alex says, “if you only played it once.”

“Believe me, that was enough for me to know.”

“I think you would play beautifully, if you gave yourself time for your muscles to learn to move like your thoughts. Instruments are a skill. Skills can be learned. But creating music requires more than that,” he says, taking up an apple to consider at some length. “An intangible quality.”

“Not only playing the notes,” Danny says, “but the spaces between them.” He watches Alex set the apple carefully into his basket, and pretends not to notice the way Alex watches him in turn.

“Yes,” he says, and Danny shivers. How many times has he heard that same whisper sighed against his ear, breathless and ecstatic? Many, and still never enough. He smiles a little, and when he turns to seek the register, Alex follows.

“There is no perfect vacuum. Those that contain no matter still contain fields of energy, fluctuations, virtual particles...” He shakes his head as Danny’s brow lifts, seeking for the right words. “Even if you could, theoretically, create a region of nothingness, its mere existence would make it _something_.”

Danny turns to him and watches him with wide eyes and warmth. He had grown accustomed, over their months together, to Alex’s strange theories and ways of speaking mathematically.

Danny has never been good with numbers, has never understood them or the need for them. Perhaps it’s why his job is so bloody menial, he doesn’t need to do anything but follow the directions of a little robotic voice. But Alex speaks in numbers as Danny does in metaphors. To him, they are communication. They are a language.

Danny wonders if he can learn to speak it someday.

“It is comforting to know none of us will ever be alone,” Danny says after a while. “Ever. Even if we try.”

Alex inclines his head to the cashier, greeting him - indeed - in Croatian before starting to unpack their baskets to be scanned. He takes Danny’s from him, fingers skimming along his arm, a deliberate touch that he keeps from registering on his features with such skill that Danny wonders for a moment if it wasn’t accidental. He knows it wasn’t, but he marvels at the control required to make it seem as such to the young man ringing up their things.

“Alone, no,” Alex agrees after a moment. “But sharing space with particles isn’t much the same as with another person. Just because we cannot exist in a vacuum - we’d negate it just by doing so, but...” He stops himself, lips thinned together to staunch the flow of theory. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t be lonely.”

Danny watches the items as they're scanned, put into white plastic bags. He looks to Alex when he pays, when he thanks the cashier and reaches to take their bags. Danny takes two as well, and as they leave the shop he switches both bags to one hand and reaches to take Alex’s with the other, threading their fingers together.

Alex glances downward towards their hands and squeezes a little, lifting a smile to Danny despite how often he tended to stiffen when their affections were shared publicly in London. Danny never took offense to it - he’d been on the receiving end of hateful bastards enough to understand, and for carrying himself with such composure, Alex is deeply shy.

But he knows just as much how sincerely Alex has always enjoyed this simple contact. It seems strange in its innocence now, considering Alex’s confession less than a day before of who he is, what he’s done, and why they’re here. But there’s nothing unusual in his smile. The gesture is as sweet and endearing as Danny’s always thought it to be.

Content in their quiet, they return through the narrow streets lined with trees and tall brick buildings. Picking their way over pavement and cobblestones, their hands remain together until Alex has to find their key. He switches on the lights and holds the door for Danny. The locks click closed one by one by one behind.

“I’m not,” Alex says, and Danny turns back to regard him as he brings their bags to the counter, meeting storm-blue eyes, wide and earnest. “Lonely. I’ve always been, even around other people, but never with you.”

Danny smiles, stepping close enough to set his hands to the lapels of Alex’s fancy jacket and his lips to Alex’s own.

“I’d never let you be,” he promises. Another chaste kiss has them sighing and leaning close. They should make dinner. Something to eat at least before falling into bed again and sleeping until morning. They should, yet Danny can do little more than press close to him, wants to do little else.

“Do you have a plan?” He asks finally.

Alex’s hands settle to Danny’s shoulders. He slides to grasp his arms and slowly slips his arms around to hold him close. They sigh together - Alex against Danny’s hair, Danny against Alex’s shirt.

“The first part’s done,” Alex tells him. “You have the drive.”

“Still,” snorts Danny, smiling against the broad expanse of Alex’s chest.

“And you’re here.”

Danny draws a little breath, taking in the scent of sweat and sandalwood when he tilts his nose against Alex’s jumper. Goosebumps trickle down his arms and when he shivers, Alex holds him closer.

“Still,” Danny says.

Spreading his fingers over the back of Danny’s neck, stroking up into his hair, he kisses his curls. Again and again, he kisses him, chaste little touches that tickle his lips. “Then I just need time to finish my work,” he says. “They wanted to ensure it wouldn’t be. They wanted me to stop, to destroy it, and I couldn’t. I wouldn’t do that for them. So now I have to finish it.”

“What will you do with it?”

Alex pulls his lips between his teeth. Brow knit, he shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

Danny laughs but it's hardly amused. It's hardly derogatory. It is quiet and soft and nervous. He nuzzles closer to Alex and circles his own wrist with the fingers of the opposite hand to clasp the man he loves nearer.

“I never had a plan with my life either,” he says. “When I tried, they fell through so I stopped trying. I stopped planning. And when I stopped planning I met you.”

Danny kisses beneath Alex’s jaw and sighs. “Maybe it's good we don't have a plan. A lack of plan means no one can stop it. No one can know it. We can finish your work.”

“I was so focused on how to get away that I didn’t think beyond it,” Alex admits, his shame easing when Danny kisses him again. “I knew they were watching me, more than usual. I could see them following me, us, together - which means they were following you too. I couldn’t risk negotiation. I’ve always been ready to run, my whole life, but I had to recalibrate. A second passport, a second ticket, the car in another name…”

Danny watches him. Slipping his arms back to Alex’s front, Danny frames his cheeks with his hands and strokes his thumbs along the dark circles beneath Alex’s eyes.

“I’ve never not had a plan before,” Alex says. “It’s terrifying.”

“And exciting.” Danny’s smile widens to a grin when Alex laughs a little.

“How do you manage it?”

“Not knowing where I’m going?” Danny laughs, and with a shrug, he shakes his head. “One step at a time. One day at a time. If you veer off path, get back on again. You just keep going.”

“With you,” Alex asks and reminds at once as he takes a step forward, and Danny takes one back.

“That part, I hope is in the plans,” grins Danny.

“When there are plans, so long as it’s safe...” Alex begins, taking another step. He blinks and after a moment, ducks his eyes in unspoken apology and says only, “Yes.”

“Any plans. We’ll make them together.”

“Yes.” Another.

“You promise,” Danny asks, as he stops against the edge of the bed and Alex searches between his eyes.

_Couldn’t you just have said yes?_

“I promise,” Alex says, and when he steps again, their bodies meet, and their mouths in turn. Collapsing together, they spill energy into the space between them. With a heated kiss too deeply missed by both to be delayed any longer, they fold together in a tangle of lips and harsh breath, gentle hands and urgent fingers. Alex holds Danny’s waist with one hand, the other set to the bed as Danny lays back and Alex goes with him.

He promised he would.

And so he always will.

Danny arches against him, draws his knees, undone laces hanging over the edge of the bed from his old boots. He laughs as he kicks them off, hooking his heel against the edge of the bed to let them drop free.

“I missed you,” Danny whispers, slipping his hands beneath Alex’s jacket to push it off his shoulders. “God, I never thought I would have this again.” His voice hitches a little and he kisses Alex again to stop the ache before it starts. Alex sits back enough to work off his jacket and his jumper. They slip from the bed, unminded, his shoes pried off with his toes and let to fall with soft thuds alongside Danny’s own. Together, lips entangled, they push up further onto the bed, Danny’s socked feet sliding against the blanket, his hands in Alex’s hair.

“I couldn’t leave you. I couldn’t,” Alex whispers, lips parting with a moan as Danny draws his lips downward, over two days’ stubble to suck a kiss against his throat. “It was only two weeks but I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t have withstood it another day. Not again,” he says. “Not again.”

Alex brings up his knees between Danny’s legs, rocking down against him in a slow press of hips to hips, stomach to stomach, chest to chest and mouth to mouth. When Danny’s arms circle his neck, he sits back and brings Danny up against him, shoving back his coat until one arm at a time he’s freed from it. Danny grasps his hoodie and t-shirt at once before Alex can, balancing across his lap as he pulls them over head and tosses them aside. Every sound that fluctuates unsteady and raw against the other’s mouth or throat or cheek brings their bodies together in a Casimir effect of their own creation. Every kiss defies the laws of physics, new energy created to fuel the perpetual motion between them.

“I missed you,” Alex moans against his mouth, broad hands against Danny’s bare back, over warm skin and smooth muscle, knobby bones and shifting sinews. Alex tilts his head back to look to Danny above, watching him with wonder. His hands slip lower to grasp Danny’s bottom, a moan pulled from both as Danny curls his lithe little body and they rock together. “I love you,” Alex whispers, and his words sound like a prayer.

Danny’s long arms wrap over Alex’s shoulders, slip into his hair and tug. He kisses with abandon, overcome entirely by Alex, as he always is. Danny loves with everything he has, his entire being and concentration honed in on his partner, bringing them pleasure that in turn feeds his own.

His heart hammers. Every pulse a reminder that Alex is alive, that he is here, that he is safe and that he is his. They are in Croatia, even though Danny doesn’t have a passport. They are in their apartment, waiting to be filled and lived in and made home. They have means. They have each other.

“I love you,” Danny breathes. “God, I love you,”

He drops his hand between them to work Alex’s trousers open, and slips into his pants to stroke his cock. He thinks of the first time, the very first time they were together like this, and how nervous Alex was.

He thinks of the bath.

He thinks of nosing softly against Alex’s arm and realizing that he would be happy, so happy, to do nothing else at all.

Danny laughs and presses a hot kiss against Alex’s jaw, whispering that he wants to suck him down, taste him as Alex gets close, spread his legs and lick him open. The response is immediate, as profound as it was the first time Danny kissed him, or touched him, or murmured dirty words against his ear. Alex’s whole body tightens to its core, snaring muscles firm and thickening his cock beneath Danny’s fingers; his breath pushes from him into a moan that sounds damn near helpless.

“Would you like that?” Danny asks, seeking over Alex’s features stricken slack with pleasure where the answer to his question is already writ. “My lips around your cock.”

Alex’s eyes flutter closed and he tenses in another firm ripple of muscle, cock twitching in a movement that carries up through his belly, chest, arms that cinch tighter around Danny’s shoulders.

“Yes,” he whispers. “Please, yes.”

Danny kisses him again, both hands in his pants now to ease his cock free. He slides from beneath Alex’s arms to kiss over his chest and down to his stomach. Taking the skin between his lips when he can, against his tongue when he can't, he settles to his knees before licking Alex teasingly from base to tip. 

Danny shivers in delight at the feeling of Alex’s hand in his hair, urging him closer, urging him to stop teasing and suck him down.

Alex is divinely demanding when he wants to be. Never selfishly, but enough to tug at some baser fantasies of Danny’s. He sucks just the head, moaning softly before bringing his hand down to slip the foreskin back and tongue against the sensitive dark pink skin. With a shudder, Alex arches up to his knees and keens, head thrown back and cock jutting forward against the roof of Danny’s mouth. He bucks again when with a noisy suckling, Danny hollows his cheeks and sucks him down to the base.

Skills can be learned, as Alex said. Danny knows he’ll discover with time and patience how he likes to be touched, how Danny likes to be touched in turn. But bad habits and neuroses are harder to break, and in his innocence, Alex harbors none. He never questions why Danny is good at this - he knows, and doesn’t care. He never forces with body or words or manipulations, exuberant simply to feel what Danny so loves to share with him.

Every suck tugs his pulse faster.

Every languid lick pulls his voice high.

Alex grasps Danny’s hair not to make him move but only to steady himself, head bowed forward again, eyes open just enough to watch. Danny lifts his eyes too, and narrows them in pleasure as Alex’s mouth slackens on another low and needy groan. He tries to speak but the words cut short when Danny parts his lips and flattens his tongue for Alex to watch his cock emerge spit-slick and shining from between his lips.

Tilting his lips sideways against Alex’s shaft, Danny kisses slowly, swollen lips curled against flushed, full, twitching heat. Alex tilts his head, too, as if in sympathy, hips jutting forward in involuntary thrusts, sliding his cock against Danny’s ready mouth.

“I want to…” Alex begins, but he shakes his head. Only when Danny lays his cheek against Alex’s thigh, sprawled nearly to his belly and still kissing the base of Alex’s cock, does Alex try again, throat clicking and heart racing. “I want to try, I’ve never - we haven’t…”

Danny’s breath tickles Alex’s groin and smiles against him, shivering in pleasure. He has imagined so often bending for him, hips in the air, face to the pillow moaning his need. But it has always been enough, always, to slip his fingers deep into Alex, spread them, encourage with soft whispers for him to arch back against him.

“God, you'll be so fucking good,” Danny whispers. He kisses against his taut stomach, his waist, up to his chest to suck in a nipple and bite it softly to tug. “I want you to try. You'll be amazing, I want you...” Danny laughs. “I want you, always.”

He latches against Alex’s nipple again just as he tries to speak, splintering his half-formed words into fragments of laughter instead. The sound melts to a moan and Alex spans his hands up the back of Danny’s neck, into his hair again. Curls wrap around his fingers and pull straight when he tugs, a toroidal compactification that reverts before his eyes to manifold loops of dark silken strands as they slip free one by one by one.

“Anything,” Alex says, pressing his palms to Danny’s cheeks to draw him upward and kiss him clumsily. “Anything,” he whispers against his mouth.

Danny’s lips slide ardent against his own, parting them wide to slide his tongue between. Alex sucks against it when it enters his mouth. He can taste himself there, and Danny too, sweat and cigarettes and the musky hint of preejaculate drawn by Danny’s sucking. All the properties of their togetherness embed together in their kiss, and Alex readily turns to lay on his back beneath the firm demands of Danny’s kiss, relinquishing himself to anything, everything, all possibilities at once.

In Danny’s orbit, Alex’s time dilates. Every sweep of their tongues together, every parting of kiss-swollen lips feels slower than it must be. His nerves spark with every click their kisses make. His heart thuds so swiftly it feels languid under Danny’s fingers, curved to press fingernails to his skin and stroke down the length of his body. They hook in the waistband of Alex’s trousers and pants both, and he lifts his hips obediently to let Danny peel them free. The sound in his head is like being underwater, a heady thrum pierced by gasps and whimpers, moans and murmurs of need.

Danny settles with spread knees over Alex’s hips and makes a show of working open the zipper and button, grinning wide when he slips a hand into his pants to stroke, watching as Alex’s cock responds with a twitch.

Danny crawls back enough to slide his pants off and kisses from Alex’s knee and up and up to his lips again.

“Okay?” He whispers.

“Okay,” Alex tells him, turning to nuzzle Danny before he pulls away. Gently, Danny shifts to kneel higher up against him. He sits carefully with his knees against Alex’s shoulders, stroking himself slowly as he tries to keep his breath even.

Without much more than a bite to his lip, Danny sets a hand to the headboard and arches up, leaning forward to let the tip of his cock slip against Alex’s lips.

That alone draws a shudder through him entirely, head to toe.

“Oh,” he breathes. “Just… open your mouth - like that, just like - _God_.”

Alex circles his lips around the head of Danny’s cock. Eyes upturned, he watches rapt the pleasure that softens Danny’s features, easing the furrow in his brow and gentling the curve of his mouth. His body, unlike his expression, pulls taut as he tugs himself gently forward by the headboard, pushing back against the curl of Alex’s tongue. The first time Alex tried this he choked, unable to close off his thoughts for long enough to settle to the rhythm that Danny finds so easily.

He’s learned, over their months together, and nights of patient practice and shared pleasure.

He’s gotten better, and he wants to be better still if it means that Danny can feel as good as he makes Alex feel.

Danny rests fluttering fingers against Alex’s jaw. Reminded with such sweetness that Alex makes a little sound, he hollows his cheeks, throat working in little swallows to suck Danny down further, to swallow the salty precome that leaks against his tongue, to ask for more. Head bowed, Danny meets his gaze. Their eyes lock, and Alex relaxes tongue and throat and lips as Danny presses deeper, but not further than he knows Alex can handle. He doesn’t need to. Already this feels so good, the heat, the pressure, the fact that it’s Alex doing this for him, giving him this submission, this willing act…

He looks down, just to see Alex’s eyes again, and curses, laughing and pressing a hand to his eyes to hide it. He shivers when Alex sets his own hands against Danny’s thighs, taut from holding himself up and not pushing in, tense from how far he has them spread, how comfortable it feels to be dominant in this way, without demeaning Alex beneath him. Never, ever would he demean him. Never in bed nor in life nor anywhere else.

“Shift your tongue, just a little, just a...”

Alex hums his understanding and Danny arches hard, spine curved beautifully, head dropped back and mouth open. His fingers curl tight against the headboard and he holds himself back from thrusting harder in. He will come. He will bloody well come from this alone.

“Gonna ride you,” Danny promises in a harsh whisper. “Gonna sit back and - _God, Alex_ , yes, fuck -”

Alex makes another sound, vibrations carrying from deep inside and up through his throat, his tongue, lips, breath fluctuating and sending resonance through Danny above. He whimpers, dark hair spilling into his eyes as he shudders. Their fidelity overrides the bounds of their bodies; their states synchronize down to the molecular state. When Alex sucks, Danny bends. When Danny moans, Alex’s cock stiffens upright from his belly.

He reaches for it not to stroke but simply to curl his fingers around the head and keep himself from climax. It isn’t to extend his own pleasure - his body is rigid with pleasure already, and he could orgasm from only the thought of Danny. In their two weeks apart, he woke often to find that he had, cotton boxers stuck against his skin where dreams of Danny forced his body to respond. He holds back because he wants this to last. He wants to watch the way Danny’s lashes flutter against his blushing cheeks, listen to the quaking of his moans, drink down the slick emissions against his tongue. Proof of virtual particles pop brightly into existence and out again in the corona of his vision. His fingers spread trembling and numb over Danny’s soft thighs.

Alex arches upward, breath rattling sharply, pushing up against Danny’s weight on his chest and Danny slips his cock free with a wet pop and a shiver. He smears a thumb against Alex’s bottom lip when he draws a breath, lips swollen and red, eyes hooded. Always beautiful, always regal, Danny never finds Alex more striking than as he is now, to see someone so strong yield to easy submission as readily as Danny is given to gentle dominance.

It was why, for a moment, Danny almost believed their lies about him. Almost. The absurdity of Alex being bold enough to buy sex toys aside, they got it wrong when they painted him as a sadist. Danny has known sadists. Alex could never be that.

“Breathe,” Danny whispers, eyes crinkling in pleasure as Alex’s chest expands, wide enough to lift him a little where he sits. He rubs feeling back into Alex’s bottom lip again, gently wiping away the spit glistening there. When Alex takes his thumb into his mouth again, Danny shivers, stroking his tongue. “Do you want me to…”

Alex shakes his head, eyes closing as he sucks softly once more, and Danny slips his thumb free. “I want to kiss you,” Alex says, with a little smile as he opens his eyes again.

Danny sighs, delighted and warm, and sets his hands to the wall to balance himself, knees trembling when he shifts back and back and back, enough to bend at the waist and press his lips to Alex’s, kissing long and slow and hot. It’s sloppy and messy, and Danny can taste himself against Alex’s tongue and it’s bloody intoxicating.

He thought he had lost this. He thought he would never have this again.

His body unfolds to press to Alex’s as they continue to kiss, hands in his damp hair, against his face, over his lips when they part to breathe and between them when they kiss again anyway, laughing.

“I could come just like this,” Danny whispers, eyes at half-mast and lips parted red. “You always undo me, no matter what you do. I love you.”

Nuzzling his cheek, Alex seeks another kiss, pressed clumsy and warm to the corner of Danny’s mouth. He wraps his fingers around Danny’s wrist; his other hand goes to his hair and grasps, always a little too hard when he does, learning still how to move in this way, unaware of his own strength, perhaps. Danny doesn’t mind. He likes the tug, the coarse movements of equal parts inexperience and enthusiasm. He likes the prickles of tension that ripple goosebumps across his skin and curl his hips.

Alex could kiss for hours, hold hands for hours, lay bare together and touch each other for hours. The sex is enjoyable - no, exhilarating - but unnecessary. If all they ever did was lie close and press their palms together, and their mouths in turn, Alex would need nothing more.

Still, he smiles when Danny rocks back against him, raising his hips in rhythm to match. Their cocks squeeze between their stomachs, rubbing together, both so close they’re trembling. Danny presses a hand to Alex’s chest and pushes upward, to rock harder together. He’s so light that Alex doesn’t mind at all.

“I’m going to,” Alex whispers.

Danny groans, ducking his head and panting soft against Alex’s lips. He doesn’t kiss him, grinning as he manages to arch up and away from one when Alex seeks. He smiles, wide and bright, and pushes a little harder against him. He can come from the bare feeling of Alex coming against him, he has before. A feedback loop of pleasure, again and again. 

“Good,” he sighs, catching a hand in Alex’s hair and turning his head with a kiss against his temple, his cheekbone, his jaw. “Please.”

“I love you,” Alex whispers.

He always does when he’s this close. The words are tight in his throat, bending to a moan as his eyes close and he arches back. Little gasps break softer, swifter against Danny’s cheek but Danny kisses him more. Everywhere, anywhere, and when he finally settles his lips against Alex’s own, Alex’s body snares tight and with a jerk his release spills hot between their bellies. The swell of his cock, pulsing hard, is enough to tip Danny over in turn, crying out softly in stilted snaps of pleasure against Alex’s cheek.

Their shared breath shuddering between them, Alex reaches with shaking fingers to bring Danny into a kiss. Another. Another, turning him to his side and his back, to lay heavy atop him and follow the curve of his throat with his lips, closing softly, often simply brushing over the rises and hollows. He’ll draw away soon, when his fastidiousness tugs at him to wash up after, but for now they bask together in afterglow, fond affection that runs deeper than both could have ever anticipated.

Danny holds him close, folding Alex against him despite him being a little taller, a little larger. Alex likes to feel safe, to feel small, to feel protected and wanted and cared for, and Danny is always happy to oblige. He holds him because he can, now, because he always will, now, come what may.

They will move soon, and take a shower. Go to the kitchen sleepy in boxer shorts and a pair of socks each and make something for dinner. Kiss against the fridge and flick water at each other when they do dishes. And then they will crawl into bed together, curl up close, and sleep.

Saving the world can start in the morning.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Though Alex's curiosity pricks at him - sketching out a means to measure where he fits into Danny’s interests - for the moment he is content simply to be grateful that Danny does like him._
> 
> _Loves him, even._
> 
> _How very unlikely._

Danny sleeps soundly as Alex wakes with clockwork efficiency, just before seven as the sun is rising over the city. Part of furnishing the flat was preparing it in the event of his arrival there. He keeps a set of suits in gradients of grey in the closet. Socks and underthings are folded neatly in a drawer beneath. Several pairs of Oxfords in black and brown, and athletic shoes set into the drawer beside the sweats he keeps for running. It’s this way in Helsinki, Seoul, and Paris. It was this way in London. Small flats, with minimal appointments and beds made. The same make and color of clothes in each. An untampered-with laptop in each desk, unopened.

Nothing to lose, if they needed to be abandoned.

Everything in order, should he need to utilize one.

Her Majesty still pays for the other three flats, which he imagines will be handed over to another agent or forfeited.

This one is his own.

This one is theirs.

He dresses in heathered grey and slides into his sneakers, stretching to his toes to feel their bounce. He brings his wallet, tucked into the inner pocket of his trousers. Arms behind his head, he turns one way and then the other, watching himself in the mirror. His body sparks to life before his thoughts, basic functionality necessary before higher processes can begin. Just like any system, he needs to maintain his core. Without it, nothing else will work.

A soft snore from the bed draws his attention, and he watches Danny sprawl across the sheets.

Alex quietly sets the coffee maker and loads it with grounds, to start brewing thirty minutes from when it’s set.

And with a quiet click of the door and the locks shut behind, Alex goes. He scarcely knows the city, having visited only once before to arrange the flat. But cities are much the same, in their make-up, and the two weeks of sleepless strain before their escape gave him time to research.

The district of Gornji Grad forms the center of Zagreb, where Parliament meets and the city’s oldest architecture can be seen. Medveščak, the specific neighborhood in which the flat exists, is frequented by sightseers who come to look at the cathedrals. The city has existed in some form since Roman settlement in the first century. It was made the capital of Croatia in 1845.

Alex repeats the facts to himself in rhythm, to time his pace as he sets out for Ribnjak Park. When facts run low, he will reiterate the Croatian he knows, a word every three strides. He will circle the park until he feels the start of the tenth kilometer, and then jog home to shower and have breakfast before beginning work.

He misses a beat as his thoughts interrupt.

Danny will be there, when he returns.

Alex wishes he had a means to measure his pace. He’s sure he’s rarely done better.

His hands are trembling when he sets the keys to the door, as much from adrenaline as from anticipation. For a moment, he doesn’t open the door, he just listens, to silence and that deliberate sort of hum that comes before an expected sound. Alex waits until it doesn’t come and holding his breath becomes overwhelming, and only then opens the door.

Danny is still in bed, sprawled long and naked and lovely amidst the tangled sheets. He was never a morning person, and Alex finds that as astounding as he does delightful. He stands near the bed a moment more, keeping his breathing quiet, before moving to make his way to the shower. Just as he steps in, he hears the coffee machine start.

The water beats against Alex’s skull and fills it with white noise. His muscles ache in the best way, his entire body feels alive and he can concentrate on any one element of it - breathing, blood, pulse, tension, release, tension, release, tension… - and feel his mind ease. This is the most alive he has felt in days. Weeks. The first time in a long time he has allowed himself to enjoy his run as much as to escape into the rhythm of his feet against the concrete.

When he steps out, he can smell the coffee. Beneath that, he can smell tea, and eggs sizzling on whatever pan Danny had been able to unearth in the sparse kitchen cupboards. There is lingering cigarette smoke too, and something sweeter still that he can’t place. Alex wraps the towel around his hips and pads towards the kitchen.

“You’re a bloody marvel,” Danny tells him, not turning from the pan where he keeps their eggs from burning. His pants hang too low on his hips and Alex recognizes them as his own. “How you get up so early is beyond me, I’ll never manage to do it.”

Danny mumbles in the morning, when he’s just awoken. His strangely scattered sentences that stop and start blend together to a sleepy slur. Alex’s chest aches just from watching him, as intensely as it does at the top of his run when his heart rate has peaked.

He loves him so much it hurts.

“You don’t have to,” Alex says after a moment, returning Danny’s smile and stepping closer. He wraps an arm around his middle and leans against him to rest his cheek against his shoulder. He smells like lavender soap and tobacco, and Alex closes his eyes to just breathe him in. “You can sleep as long as you like.”

“I will,” Danny assures him with a laugh. “Now that I don’t have to get up for work anymore.”

“I don’t know how you stay awake so late,” Alex tells him in return, smiling at the sound of his laugh.

“We will keep the entire day in check, you and I,” Danny tells him. “You up at the crack of dawn and me going to sleep just before the sun comes up.”

He moves a little to adjust the heat and shifts the eggs with the little plastic spatula until they hiss again, some yolk not yet fried hitting the heat and spitting. Danny turns his head to rub his cheek against Alex’s wet hair and smiles.

“Figured you’d go running today. You go running when you have a bloody fever, of course you’d go in a foreign city.”

“I like to run.”

“I know,” Danny laughs. “I like that you like it.”

Alex’s smile tugs a little wider before he’s able to speak again. He’s yet to reconcile the reasoning behind what Danny likes, and why Danny likes him amidst all the things he enjoys. Alex knows he’s odd; he’s been called and treated that way enough times not to doubt it. He knows the way he lives his life isn’t normal, from what he’s seen of how others live theirs.

Though his curiosity pricks at him - sketching out a means to measure where Alex fits into Danny’s interests - for the moment he is content simply to be grateful that Danny does like him.

Loves him, even.

How very unlikely.

“I went to the park,” Alex says, only reluctantly drawing away from Danny when he moves to plate their breakfast. “Over by the cathedral. You should come with me next time.”

“You know I can’t keep up with you,” Danny laughs.

“I’ll jog slowly.”

Danny laughs again and turns, holding two plates of breakfast, one in each hand. “Hero,” he tells Alex, and pushes up to his toes to kiss him chastely on the lips as he passes him to go to the table.

Alex tries not to think of that morning, when Danny had done just that, entirely smitten, making them both breakfast as Alex prepared to leave. He had thought he could, then, he had thought just walking out the door would be enough, leaving the information for Danny to find and keep just in case something happened.

He thought he could go, here, and be alone, here, without him.

Alex has never been happy to be wrong, but for this moment.

“I made you tea,” Danny tells him, walking back and interrupting the unwelcome flow of memory. “Since I know you don’t like coffee much until later in the day. But.” He interrupts himself with a sip from his own mug, as he holds Alex’s out to him. “I need coffee on mornings that lead to something unexpected.”

“Are we doing something unexpected?”

“You’re building an equation to find lies in everything people say,” Danny reminds him. “That’s not something I help someone do every day.” He takes another sip and hums pleasure at the taste. “But keep in mind, I am bloody terrible at math.”

Alex sips his tea - milk, no sugar - and follows Danny to the table set beside the terrace windows. As Danny looks toward the cathedral spires, glinting white as ivory in the morning sun, Alex watches Danny. He sits with a foot on his chair, arms looped around his leg and mug between his hands.

Alex straightens his shoulders.

“You’re not,” he says, setting aside his cup to take up his fork and eat before the eggs cool.

“I’m flattered,” Danny responds, brows raised. “Truly, I am, that you think so highly of me. But I can barely recall my own PIN number.”

“Just PIN,” Alex says. “The N stands for number.” He takes a bite, shaking his head. “But that isn’t math. That’s only memory. You said you’re bad the guitar, too, and you’re not. You only haven’t practiced it as much as other people.”

Danny can’t argue that so he takes another sip of his coffee, watching Alex as he eats. He hasn’t dressed yet, the towel still around his hips, and his stomach muscles tense once in a while when he shifts lightly in his chair. Danny licks his bottom lip into his mouth.

“Why do you think you can predict people with a mathematical equation?”

“Everything can be predicted with mathematics,” Alex tells him. “It’s the foundation of life as we know it.”

“I thought those were atoms,” Danny replies. “Or, carbon, or whatever.”

“Of living forms, maybe, but not life itself.”

Danny laughs, and it’s that slightly nervous sound, rather than the pleased warmth that Alex so loves to hear. He’s cautious, hiding his inability to understand behind humor as he works through the words presented him and tries to filter a concept from them.

“All the functions of life,” Alex says, trying again. “All the processes at work in this world, the reality we see, other worlds and other realities, universes -”

“Plural,” Danny asks, breath held.

“Yes. We find the proof of their existence through mathematical truths.”

“Of multiple universes.”

“Of everything.”

Danny shakes his head, mug held against his bottom lip for a moment. “I can hold this mug,” he says, “and know that it’s real. I know it exists because I can feel it. I can look at you and know you’re real.”

Alex’s brow creases, and Danny knows he’s not challenged by this, no more than a dog is by a flea. It’s embarrassing, but he has to try. He looks down at his cup and waits for Alex to try and find the words, but his gaze jerks back up when he does.

“For a moment, I wasn’t,” Alex says.

Danny’s eyes narrow a little.

“For a few days, to you, I didn’t exist. Not as you see me now. But you thought you saw me, and your mind told you that you wouldn’t ever see me again. That doesn’t change the fact that I still existed as you know me now. Had we means to sense it, you’d know the energy required to keep my body alive hadn’t dispersed. Our perceptions are faulty, easily deceived as much by ourselves as anything else. Mathematical truths, once proven, are not subject to the whims and failures of human emotion.”

Danny’s eyes narrow more. He thinks, for a moment, of the camp fire, of Alex’s determination to dislike and disprove and disbelieve in soul mates. He thinks of his helplessness after, when Danny had suggested they see other people, the panic in Alex’s eyes when he had insisted he didn’t need to, didn’t want to.

Misunderstanding. A crossing of two languages that did not match, between two speakers who only spoke their own.

Danny thinks of the Tower of Babel, and swallows another sip of coffee.

“Human emotion isn’t a failure,” he offers carefully, unable to keep the bitterness from his tone before he takes a deep breath and tries to address another part of Alex’s musings. “A hindrance sometimes, maybe. To me, you were dead, because all the evidence stacked up to prove you were.” Danny’s voice tightens a moment and he slips both legs to the floor, sitting back in his chair. “Something I could touch and see for myself. But in the back of my mind I didn’t believe it, I didn’t want to. There’s nothing mathematical about the fact that you were gone to me and I didn’t want you to be. You can’t make that into an equation. How can you do that with lies?”

Alex wipes his mouth neatly and folds the slip of paper towel in half, setting it on his empty plate. His attention darts to Danny’s own, untouched, and he sifts through every correction that presents itself to what Danny has said. There were an infinite array of potentialities to how that night might have ended, each instant spanning into exponential manifold realities. He died. His attacker died. And onward and onward, smaller and smaller.

He doesn’t tell Danny that he did die, just as much as he survived. He gathers from the look Danny gives him already that it wouldn’t go over well.

“The equation,” he says, “though it’s much more an algorithm, really…”

“The algorithm,” Danny repeats.

“Table salt,” Alex explains, grasping the little tube they bought the night before and sliding it center, “is defined by certain behavioral characteristics. You can describe how it looks. How it tastes. Its effect on liquids. If you dig deeper, you reach the chemical components of it. Sodium chloride, iodine, other agents to stop it just soaking up moisture in the air and condensing. But we don’t need to go that far.”

“No,” Danny says, although wary as he does, glancing between the salt and his lover. His boyfriend? Not the time. He shakes his head and focuses.

“How do you define a person?” Alex asks. “The same way. Certain behavioral characteristics. We need only compare one’s behavior to what one says, to determine if they’re telling the truth, or engaged in obfuscation. If numerically we can assign values to those behaviors, then it’s no different than adding two and two to get four, or finding the error in two and two equalling five. Whether we see salt and taste salt, or whether we see salt and taste something else entirely.”

Danny bites his lip and lets his eyes slip from Alex for a moment. It makes sense, building up a person from the smallest particles up and up, but it feels almost demeaning to do so, to assign a number - nothing more than a simple number - to something as complex as an emotion. There are so many. Too many. There wouldn’t be enough comprehensible numbers, Danny thinks.

He doesn’t say it. He knows he’ll be corrected.

“How can you differentiate between the types of lies?” Danny asks instead. “A lie meant maliciously, one a white lie, another intentional but with good intentions rather than bad -”

“There’s no such thing.”

“You didn’t tell me you were alive,” Danny reminds him, not unkindly. “Because you thought you could leave, and spare me more pain. Isn’t that why you did it?” _Before you couldn’t anymore. Thank God you couldn’t anymore._ “That’s a kind of kind lie, it’s very different to a cruel one. Very different to a lie that holds no conviction.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t love you,” Danny tells him immediately, blinking slowly at him before tilting his head to rest it against his shoulder. “Lies are… sometimes you don’t know you’ll tell them, they just happen. Everyone lies every day, Alex, your invention will see nothing but lies.”

“People don’t have to lie,” Alex replies. “It’s a conscious choice to.”

“Like saying ‘I’m fine’,” Danny continues gently. “When you’re anything but. That’s still a lie.”

“Yes,” Alex says. He grasps his mug, cooling now, and brings it to his lips. “Like telling you my name was Joe.”

Danny finally takes up his fork, as Alex finishes his tea and sets the mug back to the table.

“We all lie, you’re right. We all must, at times, say things we don’t mean. But there are lies that harm, just as there are those that do not.”

Danny inclines his head, yielding. “There are.”

“I would rather know if someone is lying to me, and then decide - with all the information at hand - whether or not it’s harmful. Everyone should have that right,” he says. “I cannot stop people from telling untruths, but I can give them the tool to know when it’s happening to them. And perhaps having access to that tool will make someone less likely to hide their intentions, knowing they will be found out.”

For a moment, Danny says nothing. He has always felt lies, they are like sandpaper on skin. Sometimes tickling, when they’re little and non-abrasive. And other times cruelly sharp, enough to ache. He has come out of relationships covered in bruises and blood, thinking that if he stayed long enough, if he tried hard enough, the scrape would feel like a caress, and he wouldn’t find it painful anymore.

He looks to Alex and wonders who rubbed him raw, to make him want to quantify something as complex as a human being. He realizes it doesn’t matter, so long as they don’t hurt him again.

“Okay,” he says after a few more forkfuls of breakfast, concentrating on his plate. Danny can feel lies and know their hurt. Someone who cannot feel pain wouldn’t know. They would look down and see the blood, see the raw scraped skin and know they were meant to feel it but not know why. Not know how. “Let’s find a way to make your algorithm work.”

Alex’s breath leaves him softly, but completely. He isn’t good with words, but he tried, and Danny understands even when he fails. Alex slips the salt aside again and stands, taking up his plate to return it to the kitchen. He starts the kettle again for more tea, and as he returns, he stops beside Danny.

“I need you,” Alex says. “I need you for this. You knew that I wasn’t telling you things. You knew that my name wasn’t Joe. I’ve been tested on lie detector tests and passed them without a single spike in blood pressure. But you knew. Now we simply have to figure out how, and apply it.”

He tucks a kiss against his hair, lingering as long as he needs to fill his lungs with the warm, familiar smell of him, and then continues on. Alex’s towel slips from narrow hips as he stands before the wardrobe, bare for only an instant before seeking out a pair of sleek black boxers.

Danny finishes his breakfast and takes his dishes to the sink, padding back to the bed and crawling over it to sit on the other end, just behind Alex as he dresses. With a smile, when Alex turns, Danny sets his hands behind himself and relaxes, comfortable. He enjoys the little show of Alex dressing, in a smart shirt and slacks and matching socks even though neither have to go anywhere today. He enjoys it and curls his toes, and draws his legs up and wraps his arms around them, sitting in a ball on the bed.

“How shall we start?” he asks.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“And when future behavior deviates from what’s expected?” Danny asks._
> 
> _“But it won’t,” Alex says, and then he closes his eyes, rubbing his face against his arm. “It shouldn’t. But it does. You do. If I could resolve you, then we’d have it.”_

Danny brushes his teeth standing in the doorway of the bathroom, shoulder against the jamb and one arm crossed over the other as he pensively rubs the brush over and over against his teeth.

Alex is at his desk, papers overflowing down the sides like some metaphorical representation of being overwhelmed. He pays it little mind, piling more papers on the floor beside himself, against the window, against the dinner table, on the counter, by the bed…

They haven't talked in two hours and Danny already feels the pang of regret for telling Alex not to follow him into the bathroom when he slammed the door - the only door in their house to slam - in frustration. A lot makes him angry. His personality and Alex’s match not at all and if neither loved the other so much, one of them would have been long gone by now. But both are too stubborn, both are too entwined now to just do that.

Instead they bicker, they separate to opposite ends of the house, letting their eyes and their fingers run over the writing they’ve penned on the walls, from the ceiling to the floor. Equations and Danny’s clarifications for himself beneath. Past theories, old theories, ideas, scribbles. Danny turns to spit into the sink and lets his eyes linger on the mirror, also covered in notes and half-smudged ideas both or one of them have had in the shower.

Their house is ridiculous. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Rinsing his mouth, Danny shuts off the water and lets the toothbrush clatter in its glass before entering their house properly again. He stretches his arms over his head and groans softly, and when he drops them, he settles one against Alex’s shoulder and squeezes.

Alex draws a breath deeply, suddenly. It’s almost a flinch, but he doesn’t pull away and Danny doesn’t move his hand. Distilled from the air around them, tension gathers in his shoulders and down his back, condensing and easing beneath the steady movement of Danny’s fingers.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Alex says, looking towards his screen and its wide ubiquitous glow, but not at it.

“No one likes to think of themselves as ‘average’,” Danny says, bringing his other hand to Alex’s opposite shoulder. “Even if we are. Even if we’re wholly ‘normal’. ‘Standard’.”

Alex doesn’t stop him from speaking. He doesn’t draw away from the words he knows he said, without thinking about how Danny would hear them. Bowing his head and closing his eyes, he tries to settle under Danny’s gentle grip, making soft sounds when Danny’s thumbs work against a knot.

“I wish I were,” Alex says, with a little smile. “But you’re not. Not to me.”

Danny just hums and closes his eyes with a soft sigh. He isn’t hurt, not anymore. He thinks over and over of the Tower, over and over of the communication that had been broken once the tower had been disallowed by a possible God at a possible time in a possible place. He thinks of their discussions to label all the work processes with numbers and letters both, so they could both understand.

“How can we get around that?” Danny muses, opening his eyes again. “A truth that could count as a lie. Words that are not meant as they are said but meant as something else? How can you account for that?” Danny strokes a hand into Alex’s hair. “Can you?”

Alex tilts his head back when Danny’s fingers curl softly over his scalp. His nerves settle and spark all at once, drawn to attention and eased from their strained hyperalertness. He considers in this new example the paradox, often discussed between them, of how truth and lie might exist in tandem.

“I wasn’t lying,” he says, “but the way I worded my truth was faulty.”

“Yes,” Danny says, smiling a little as Alex’s eyes close in thought.

“Context, perhaps. My argument was lacking context.”

“Explain,” asks Danny, as he’s accustomed to doing now when he loses the thread of Alex’s words, half-spoken between thoughts that move too quickly for him to articulate. “But not here,” he says. “You need to lay down, your shoulders are a mess.”

“I don’t want you to stop,” Alex says with a little smile.

“Bed,” Danny murmurs, kissing Alex’s brow and giving his hair a gentle tug. Alex leans forward and closes his computer, pressing his fingers against his eyes for a long moment before turning to follow Danny.

“An error in speech,” he says again, as he twists his undershirt off over his head, “clarified by context. Are we discussing fitting a sociological average, or my personal feelings towards you? The questions are different. The statement and tone are different.”

“Would it have shown a lie, when you said those things?”

Alex parts his lips with his tongue, expression softening in apology as he shakes his head. “No. No,” he says, “but that’s one statement. It doesn’t encompass everything I think about you.”

“Therein lies the crux of our confusion and difficulties,” Danny says, watching Alex crawl into bed and lie face down against it with a groan. He folds his arms beneath his head and turns it so his voice isn’t muffled by the pillows.

“Unfortunately.”

“That’s why I find it so...” Danny tries to choose the right word, crawling to sit astride Alex before setting his hands to his shoulders again, kneading there. “Colossal. This whole project, it seems to be entirely too enormous for two people to manage.”

He does not call Alex’s theories and apparently proven scientific discoveries impossible, just as Alex no longer frowns at the mention of anything outside of a studied and proven experiment as evidence. Slowly they push the other to understand, just a little more, every day.

“A machine can be programmed to read. Linguistic patterns, anomalies in phrasing. Algorithms like this exist already to detect fraud, but this is something on a greater scale.”

“There will always be something a machine cannot do,” Danny tells him, laughing when Alex makes a sound of protest. He doesn’t want a fight, not again. He eases his fingers against Alex’s neck. “Making decisions will always be a human thing, an organic process, not something that can artificially be created, like limbs. No machine has yet to pass the Turing test properly, not a single one. And if they cannot pass for human how can they understand? How can we make them understand?”

Alex is quiet for a long time, relaxing but not yet closing his eyes beneath Danny’s touch. Danny doesn’t stop. He seeks over firm muscles, still honed to firmness every morning through running in the park and doing calisthenics in the small enclosed garden beneath their terrace. Danny joins him once in a while; just as often he watches him or makes breakfast.

“If we’re the result of our decisions, and the decisions made upon us, then creating enough markers to measure those decisions should be sufficient. It’s perturbation theory,” he says. “An approximate solution can be discerned by resolving a related, simpler problem. Breaking it into parts. If we can define human behavior with enough numerical signifiers, then we can theorize future behavior.”

“And when future behavior deviates from what’s expected?” Danny asks.

“But it won’t,” Alex says, and then he closes his eyes, rubbing his face against his arm. “It shouldn’t. But it does. You do. If I could resolve you, then we’d have it.”

Danny licks his bottom lip into his mouth, giving himself a moment to relax. Giving Alex a chance to hear the quiet, and murmur an apology against his arm. He turns and Danny adjusts to let him, sitting against his chest as Alex settles to his back with hands against his thighs.

“I know my markers. I know the decisions that shaped me and my decisions that shape my behaviors in predictable ways. Over and over,” Alex says, “you’ve defied my predictions. You’ve changed my behavior.”

“Aren’t I just another marker, then,” Danny asks, even as the words strap his ribs a little tighter against his lungs. “Another outside influence, given a number to add to the algorithm?”

“It began before you could have been,” Alex says, breath held as he seeks for an example, fingers spreading over Danny’s thighs. “I don’t like to be touched. At all, from anyone. I never have. And yet I touched you first, on the bridge. I shook your hand first. And every time I did, I enjoyed it.”

Danny blinks. He has never considered this. To him, Alex has been almost overly affectionate. A lover of cuddling and kisses, holding hands and touching. He would never have assumed that before they were together, Alex had shunned physical contact and the people offering it. He reaches, now, to draw his knuckles down Alex’s cheek, fingertips against his lips. “You never told me before.” 

“Because it hasn’t ever been unpleasant, not once. Why bring up something not pertinent to a person or situation merely to make difficulties?”

“A lie by omission?”

Alex laughs, shaking his head. “You never asked and thus I never lied.”

“But that is yet another thing to consider,” Danny laughs with him. “Lies never told that have the potential to be born when the circumstances line up to bring it to pertinence.”

“If you had asked, I’d have been honest with you. I wouldn’t lie about that.”

“We’ve already determined that you’re not a good control for this,” Danny says, fondly. Alex tilts his cheek against Danny’s hand, nuzzling against his palm before Danny strokes it back through his hair. His heart beats faster, where Danny’s thigh presses over it. He spreads his fingers through the soft, dark hair on Danny’s legs, over his knees and across his calves.

He’s tired. They both are. Months of work to hone Alex’s algorithm tighter than it was before. Months of work to better understand the other, striving daily to navigate the new spaces between them. Neither know what time it is, but they’ve been at work since the night before. A pound of coffee gone and a pack and a half of cigarettes, Gauloises instead of Dunhills, when they proved too rare to come by in Croatia.

Danny watches him a moment more, when no answer comes, and neither an admission that he doesn’t know. He can count on one hand the amount of times Alex has said it, and almost always after they’ve had a row. Slowly, he slips back and straddles Alex’s thighs instead of his chest, kissing along his jaw.

“We need a break,” he says. Alex’s eyes open but Danny shakes his head, and kisses his throat. “Just a day. Twenty-four hours to recalibrate ourselves. We can’t be expected to grasp every bloody complexity of human nature if we’re in this flat all the time.”

His gentle jest draws little reaction, but another kiss settles Alex’s eyes closed again. He slips a hand through Danny’s hair, and turns to press his lips against his cheek. “If you like,” he says, nodding. “Yes. Where?”

“Here for now,” Danny tells him, slipping from astride Alex to rest beside him instead. “Just lie still for a minute. Don’t do anything. Don’t think about anything.”

“That’s impossible,” Alex tells him and they both snort softly.

“Fine,” Danny agrees. “Close your eyes and think about my hands and nothing else.”

“Where?” Alex asks, letting his eyes slip closed obediently. Danny watches him for just a moment, wondering what would happen if he didn’t answer, knowing that Alex would try his best to think, concentrate, and eventually slip into the concept and memories he has. Danny doesn’t have it so easy, he needs to concentrate on something he can control. His own hand, Alex’s, something that smells like him with which he can work with, relate to, ground himself.

“Just here,” he says instead, setting his fingertips to the dip of Alex’s nose, a slow and deliberate touch down the length of it, to the tip and down to the little divot on his top lip. Alex parts his lips to sigh, to seek for Danny’s fingers but he draws them away, over the lovely sharp points of his cheekbones, beneath his eyes, spreading symmetrically to his ears to trace the sensitive skin there.

Alex’s body curves, muscles rippling slowly upward until his head tilts back. His eyes move, beneath their lids, as if reading equations written even there. Danny hushes him with a soft sound and waits for his seeking to settle to peace.

Down from Alex’s ears, he glides along the wide curve of his jaw. Shaved smooth every morning, there is a fine rasp of stubble now beneath his fingertips. He strokes slowly upward, palms against his cheeks, and thumbs from the center of his lips outward. Following the tendons in his neck, Danny’s fingers press against his pulse just enough to feel it, and let Alex feel it in response.

Their breathing, together, begins to steady. Every exhalation eliminates from between them the lasting sting of unsteady words slung towards the other, misunderstanding again and again, accidentally and then deliberately. Alex struck first, insensitive words spoken without care or awareness for their perception. Danny struck next, happy to dig against the verbal bruises left so that Alex could see how they hurt.

Alex is right. He often is. Their histories and thoughts share little in common, more often at odds than in synchronicity. Their behavioral patterns should have steered them both in opposite directions when they saw how disparately they view and describe their world. But it is a shared world; they are the other’s exception.

And from the moment that Alex swept his thumb against the bead of sweat from Danny’s brow, until now when Danny presses a kiss against his heart, their connection has wavered, but never broken.

“What are you thinking about?” Danny asks, and Alex smiles a little.

“Your hands,” he says. “And that I hope you keep touching me.”

Danny sighs against him, but beyond his hands he doesn’t touch Alex. He looks at him, watches him tense and relax not from upset but from anticipation. It’s been a long time since they’ve been able to just touch. Not that they haven’t, but something would always pull them apart. Work, sex, obligations, back then untold white little lies. Now, they have twenty-four hours for nothing but this, nothing but each other.

Danny draws his thumbs down the center of Alex’s chest and circles around his nipples with the rough pads of his fingers. He smiles when Alex responds, and ducks his head to breathe over them before pulling away again.

“I don’t want to stop touching you.”

Alex’s smile widens a little more, but he makes those muscles ease too. “Can I touch you?”

“Soon,” Danny says, as his fingers follow the furrows Alex’s ribs, along his sides to rest on his waist. He tilts his cheek against the downy hair on his chest. Alex’s heart thumps steady beneath his ear.

“Will you kiss me?”

Danny ducks his head and laughs a little. “Soon,” he says, before he presses a kiss to the center of Alex’s chest.

His waist narrows to sharp hips, jutting against smooth skin. It slopes to warm hollows before rising again to the plane of his stomach, rigged with muscles that tighten when Danny’s fingers graze against them. He curls them to softly scrape his fingernails across, sighing heat against Alex’s belly when he tenses and his abs define sharper still. Nosing against their center, Danny’s lips brush but don’t close again, not until he reaches the first darkening hairs beneath his navel, disappearing into the soft sweatpants he put on after his shower.

“Please,” Alex whispers.

“Soon,” Danny breathes back, holding him steady as he begins to retrace the path his fingers took with the tip of his nose, now, with his lips, with his sighs and gentle nuzzles. Alex is trembling by the time Danny reaches his lips and kisses him soundly, a deliberately soft thing, eased down with tickling fingertips.

“You’re not so tense anymore,” Danny tells him, smiling when Alex opens his eyes and huffs a breath of amusement. 

“Not from unpleasant things, no.”

“We should sleep,” Danny tells him. “Both of us. For longer than a few hours here and there, and tomorrow...”

“Tomorrow?”

“We’ll go out.”

Alex circles Danny in his arms and turns him to his side. Resting their brows together, he nuzzles against his cheek, the corner of his lips, the center, holding a still and quiet kiss against him. When they part again, he reaches past, to switch off the light beside the bed and draw the sheets up over them. Most of the bed remains unused; they draw together tightly, tangled limbs twined together, adjusting in little movements until Alex has tucked his head beneath Danny’s chin, and Danny breathes softly against his hair.

“I’m sorry,” Alex murmurs, “for what I said before.”

“I’m sorry for slamming the bathroom door,” Danny answers. “Twice.”

“I tried to tell you that you were forgetting your cigarettes.”

“I didn’t know you knew I smoked them in the bathroom sometimes.”

Alex’s smile widens, until he laughs a little. Maybe he should mind, the bits of ash he’s found around the side of the tub when he comes home after a run. Maybe he should mind the curl of smoke on his towel when he uses it. But for all his tidiness, all the order Alex keeps in his sphere, he finds he doesn’t mind at all.

Always his exception, in every way.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Before him sits a man humming with energy, eyes wide and bright, lips parted and expression one of almost childish delight. He pushes to stand from the stool and leans over the table to kiss Danny square on the mouth, holding his cheeks and their lips together even as some people wolf whistle, others yell comments Danny doesn’t understand. When Alex pulls back, Danny just blinks at him, flushed and warm as contagious energy seeps through his skin._
> 
> _“You found something,” he says softly, feeling his own grin grow._

“I never imagined you’d miss a run.”

Alex ducks his head. He quiets his immediate reaction - that if Danny had weighed his own importance higher in Alex’s decision-making, as high as Alex knows it to be, he’d have known that Alex would gladly yield that to him. There isn’t anything that ranks higher in importance in his hierarchy.

He smiles when Danny takes his arm, their footsteps falling steady against the rain-damp sidewalk. They slept in late, waiting for the rain to stop. They laid in bed longer still when Alex rolled to his stomach and Danny pressed atop him, sighing heat against his hair.

The computer remained closed. No new notes were added to the sheafs of papers. No new ideas were pinned to their ever-expanding wallpaper of information.

“You were more important,” Alex tells him. “You are.”

Danny leans against him and they veer a little as they walk, until Alex evens them out again and Danny laughs. The weather is not cold enough for jackets, so light hoodies and scarves over a tee shirt or button-up do them fine. Danny has new boots - necessary here, with the weather a little more harsh than London. He still marvels at the fact that his shoes are collecting scuffs, not smearing new ones over layers and layers of old.

They head to Tkalčićeva Street, with no plan whatsoever beyond browsing, and going into the nearest place that calls them close.

There are enough people about to make it comfortable. Danny still feels like a tourist. In the time they have been here he has rarely been out on his own. Entirely by choice, by wanting to remain close as Alex worked, because he didn’t speak the language or know the customs or any places nearby to go dancing in. He’s felt a bit of a shut-in, even when he would occasionally join Alex on a run.

Danny sees it first, and in the slowly cooling and darkening late afternoon, he drags Alex along with a laugh to the front door and gestures grandly for him to enter the Oliver Twist Pub.

“I think we’re a tad underdressed,” Danny tells him, holding open the door. “But we can always claim we forgot our top hats and tails at home.”

Alex’s lips part but he can only laugh softly as he steps past Danny into the pub. He lifts his eyes to the low ceilings, lined with dark rafters, to the strangely small rooms that lead one to the next. There are as many here who speak English as Croatian, French threaded throughout, and German too. Still warm enough at this time of year to draw tourists to the Croatian beaches, stopping in the capitol along the way.

Danny watches Alex’s attention shift quickly across the crowd, pausing for an instant on every table, every window, every doorway. He forgets, often, that Alex was a spy. His time in knowing Alex, and Alex’s working for MI6, was a brief overlap in the ongoing span of their relationship, and they’ve spoken little about it. It’s rare moments like these that he’s reminded, in a practiced survey of his surroundings that would seem like paranoia if Danny didn’t know the reason for it.

But he does, and when Alex turns back to him with a gentle little smile, it makes Danny feel curiously safe.

“You’ll have to take the lead,” Alex says to him, happy to defer to Danny’s familiarity with places like this. “Though even without frock coats and cravats,” he adds, “perhaps being genuinely English will put us in good favor.”

Danny blinks at him, eyes wide.

“I don’t speak the language,” he mumbles, swallowing and tugging Alex along to the bar so he can order, so he can speak, but the other stays stubbornly put, ducking his head then gesturing with his chin for Danny to go ahead without him.

“I’ll get a table.”

“But...” Danny curses softly when Alex leaves, and draws a hand through his hair. He thinks back to how he used to be so bloody good at being social. He could walk into any club, into any bar, and charm the pants off of anyone. He could get in by flirting with the bouncer, he could talk his way to free drinks from several different people, he could dance the night away and not say a single word and still have people around him…

But this is different. This isn’t England. He can’t speak the language here, even if he doesn’t explicitly have to, it feels like a stifling barrier.

“Dammit Alex,” he sighs, dragging his feet to the bar and chewing his lip before forcing forth a smile, a shadow of his former confident self, and gesturing to the beers. Any, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t know half the names anyway. The young girl behind the bar smiles at him and it eases Danny’s tension a bit. But he still doesn’t say anything, just points.

He holds out a small handful of bills and coins, and she happily sifts through to set aside what Danny hopes is the right amount.

“Two beers,” she says, in accented English.

Danny laughs, softly, and nods. “Yes,” he answers, gesturing to her as well. “And you.”

She seems a little surprised, but from the mixed company in the bar, not unfamiliar with being tipped by tourists. She takes a single bill with a wink, and sets it with the rest before sliding his beers to him. Danny just hopes that his smile is enough in thanks, before seeking out Alex in the pub.

He’s hard to miss, the only one here in a suit, tall and elegant and distinctly uncomfortable where he sits with his back against the wall. Danny twines through the tables and sighs as he reaches their table, sliding a beer across to him before settling in the seat across. Alex lifts a brow but accepts the beer with a slight smile. They lift their glasses together, and each sip.

“Does it feel like home?” Alex asks, sucking the foam from his upper lip.

Danny considers. His home was never a permanent state, he was never in one home for very long. They would move or he would run away or he would couch surf with whichever friends could afford to house him for a week or two. He’d ended up staying with Pavel and Sara because he’d managed to hold down a job by then, and they had the room spare.

Outside of them and the first twelve years of his life when he had no choice but to live with his parents, this is the longest he has ever lived with someone else, and not moved.

“I wonder if I was born in the wrong century,” Danny muses, drawing his fingertips over the glass to make it squeak. “It feels more like home than most of the homes I’ve had in the past.”

Alex looks down to his beer, but only for a moment before his attention lifts again, to the bar around them and to the streets outside lit golden by old street lamps. He centers on Danny, though, gaze searching between his eyes, along the sides of his face, down to his mouth and away again. It feels like a caress, and Danny shivers softly from the attention.

“That’s a start then,” Alex says. “Maybe it will begin to feel more that way, given time and familiarity.” He folds his hands around his glass, and Danny thinks of the first time they shared a drink together, shots taken in his flat - two each, to steady their nerves before they bared themselves to the other.

“Maybe,” Danny agrees, nodding before he sips his beer, the bubbles breaking against his lip. “Yes, I think it will.”

“I don’t know how it should feel,” Alex says. “Home. Simply as a place to live, yes, but the word means more than that. There are connotations that I don’t understand.” He stops his words short, drawing a breath and washing it down with a sip. “I think other centuries would have been unkind to us.”

“We think too much,” Danny agrees. “We would hardly do well in a society that wants to think for you.”

“In a way...”

“Don’t,” Danny laughs. “Not today.” It’s soft, but Alex listens, and doesn’t drop them into a rabbit hole of social debate when they had promised the other at least twenty-four hours of peace. “I think home is as much a concept as missing someone is. You can miss someone who you just saw a moment ago, but you miss them not for distance, but because you want them to be right there with you experiencing something that makes you happy.”

He takes another sip of beer and sets his foot against Alex’s stool, close enough to press his ankle to the other’s calf. “I think that’s what home is. It can be a person, not a place. Just that feeling of - of knowing you belong, knowing you can go to that person come what may and they’ll be there for you.” He smiles. “In that respect, I’ve felt home for over a year, now.”

For a moment Alex is expressionless, but Danny gives him his moment. He knows by now that it isn’t disregard or disinterest. He’s processing, the same way Alex’s computer hums louder when he plugs their algorithm into it. After a beat, a breath, Alex’s eyes soften a little, a look of something like discomfort, pulled from places that he doesn’t usually access.

Danny could laugh. He’s even starting to think in computing metaphors.

“In that respect,” Alex says, words carefully and individually chosen, “I don’t think I’ve ever had a home. Not by that definition.”

“Never?” Danny asks, and he tilts his foot up as he does, a gentle reassurance of touch that yields an easing of Alex’s shoulders. Alex simply shakes his head, once.

“Growing up, everything was focused on study. In school, everything was preparation for work. When I was recruited...” He draws a breath and smiles a little. It fades quickly. “No,” he says. “Never. Not until I met you. Your flat, this one - that doesn’t matter. If a home can be a person, then you’ve been my home.”

Danny licks his lips and turns to regard the bar at large again, the people within it, the place itself. It feels like any other bar to him, comfortably crowded and a little too loud to have a soft conversation in but it doesn’t matter. It’s nice here.

“It’s freeing, knowing we can move our home whenever we want,” Danny says after a while. “Anywhere you go, I will go and anywhere I settle, you will settle with me.”

Alex nods, a simple gesture but in that motion a great deal more than most would convey. “I knew there was a chance that you wouldn’t come with me,” he says. “I worried that without the entire context, my suggestion wouldn’t make sense to you.”

“It didn’t,” Danny says with a laugh. “It really didn’t.”

“But you came anyway.”

“Yes. Yeah. I did. It helped that MI-...” Alex lifts his fingers, just gently and Danny nods. “It helped that I could assume, from what went on, that I’d not be in a good way if I stayed.”

Alex’s smile quirks wider again, fascinated and charmed by Danny’s skill with turning words in ways that defy Alex himself.

“But what did I have to lose? Friends, yes, who I miss but…” He shakes his head, tongue parting his lips. “A job I hated, going nowhere. A bloody bleak flat. Dancing, sometimes. And instead I have you. An adventure. A place I’ve never been before and a chance to start again. Wouldn’t you have gone?”

Genuinely caught off-guard, Alex sips his beer in the space it takes him to consider himself in Danny’s shoes. If he had seen Danny, presumably, dead and his memory tainted beyond what he knew of him. If he’d been interrogated by the police. Had he known nothing of what Danny, a spy in his stead for the sake of consideration, were doing or why any of this had happened. If Danny had come to him again, alive, and told him to leave everything behind and go, right then, and leave it all behind.

And Alex shakes his head a little, eyes wide.

“No,” he says. “I don’t know that I could have. But I may have anyway.”

He could have gone and he could have stayed, just as Danny might have told him no and called the police. Just as Danny came with him and resisted, leaving bruises against his chest. What Alex hoped would happen is what transpired, but what could have happened is infinite. There would be no behaviorism that could apply to their decisions in such extraordinary circumstances, no past decisions that might have predetermined what’s transpired.

Alex might have stopped on the bridge or kept running. Danny sought him out again to return the bottle but might have simply kept it. Alex inviting him over and shaking his hand too many times. Danny barreling down the stairs of his flat again to stop him before he left.

Nothing in either of their histories should lead to where they are now. And yet they sit together, facing, their legs entwined. They have found an unlikely home within the other. Something greater than their understanding has linked them inextricably, through a series of events beyond either of their predictions.

“But I would have loved you,” Alex says, shaking his head again. “I couldn’t not love you. That decision was never mine to make. It happened, beyond my control. It wasn’t history and behavior. It was conditional probability,” he says, an apology in his eyes as his realizations snare him taut. “One event altering the likelihood of the next, on and on until we’re here.”

Danny laughs and it is lovely, bright and pleased, narrowing his eyes and pushing his beautiful dimples deeper against his cheeks. He brings the beer to his lips again and Alex can’t take his eyes off of him. It’s as though he’s glowing, radiating joy and wonder and beauty. He thinks of that moment on the bridge - how he felt his legs slow their pace, his breath hitch a little. How he moved towards Danny without any control of himself. Because he couldn’t not. Because he felt that he would have, in any universe, in any time.

“Half a beer and you become a bloody fatalist,” Danny mumbles into his own drink, licking his lips and setting the glass aside. He looks at Alex and narrows his eyes. “What?”

Before him sits a man humming with energy, eyes wide and bright, lips parted and expression one of almost childish delight. He pushes to stand from the stool and leans over the table to kiss Danny square on the mouth, holding his cheeks and their lips together even as some people wolf whistle, others yell comments Danny doesn’t understand. When Alex pulls back, Danny just blinks at him, flushed and warm as contagious energy seeps through his skin.

“You found something,” he says softly, feeling his own grin grow.

Alex nods, because the numbers are moving too quickly for his words to catch up. He nods, because all at once the paradoxes in their work turn just enough to sync together. Missing pieces reveal themselves but the picture becomes clear in a sprawl of equations and proofs like chalk against blackboard walls. He follows their movement, one to the next to the next.

He could no more quantify the whole of human behavior than he could define a forest by every individual leaf in every variation, mutable and impermanent. And all the while, patient and beautiful, Danny saw the forest as a whole, formed by the chaos of chance and probability and infinite possibility.

“Yes,” Alex says. “I found you.”

Danny snorts a little laugh but the sip he tries to take never reaches his lips, Alex’s hand wrapped warmly around his wrist. He spreads his fingers over Alex’s and threads them, squeezing softly. Alex laughs, turning their hands together until they press palm to palm.

“What are the odds?” 

Alex never does finish his beer. Every step home moves a little faster than the one before it, every laugh shared between them freer than perhaps they’ve ever been. Danny doesn’t need to know the specifics of the mountain they’ve scaled to know that they have, and that together they stand on its precipice. He doesn’t need to know that the tides that have battered them might finally begin to recede.

He doesn’t need to know the math behind why Alex loves him. It’s enough to know that he does.

Their kiss draws them fiercely together as the door to their flat bangs shut behind. Alex works his buttons free without breaking the kiss for more than a breath, shouldering his jacket to the floor and grasping Danny’s cheeks. He kisses like a drowning man who’s reached air again, damn near desperate in his relief.

“Explain?” Danny asks, pulled to a breathless moan as Alex tugs his hoodie off over his head and grasps hard hands against his bare waist.

“Tomorrow,” Alex says, breathless. “Tomorrow. Not tonight. I promised.”

“It’s fine,” Danny laughs, stepping backward towards the bed, leaving his shoes behind. “It’s fine, if you need to write it down, or - or make notes -”

“Numbers, Danny, I have no problem with,” Alex whispers.

Danny laughs and wraps his arms around him, trusting entirely that Alex will get him to bed, safely and comfortably, press down against him as both squirm from their clothes. Danny can feel it, whatever energy this is, whatever Alex has discovered that he seems to know innately, now, sure he will not forget the next morning when the haze of warmth and beer passes. He can feel Alex’s pulse spike when he draws his fingers over his throat to press against it.

He is radiant. He is entirely alive.

“I love you,” Danny tells him, laughing when Alex ducks his head to press a tickling kiss against his throat. “I love you.”

“I love you,” Alex answers, lips spreading against Danny’s neck, just beneath his jaw, and closing slowly in a softly sucking kiss. “I don’t need anyone else. I’ve never needed anyone else.”

He bends and grasps Danny by his thighs, hoisting him from the floor. With a startled laugh, Danny wraps his legs around his waist, arms around his neck, mouth against his with a noise of delight. Alex is taller, broader, stronger by far, and Danny always happy to revel in those rare moments when he uses it. Arms circling Danny’s middle, Alex carries him easily towards the bed, turning his head to take kisses against his cheek, his jaw, his throat.

Anywhere Danny can kiss him, he does, over and over, whispering affection against his ear. Alex slides atop him as Danny lays back, still curled around the hard body holding strong above his own. A slow downward press strokes their cocks together, a question always in Alex’s eyes when he feels himself begin to harden, lips parted in asking wordless permission and disbelief that he would be allowed to have this.

With Danny. Only ever with Danny.

“I want to feel you,” Dany breathes, “I want to feel you for days, please...”

He lifts his arms when Alex peels his shirt from him, immediately wrapping them loosely around Alex’s head as he presses reverent kisses against his neck, his chest and stomach, hands working with the belt at his waist. Danny draws his nails lightly over Alex’s back, through the thin cotton he wears. When he manages to squeeze his arms between them he fumbles with the buttons of his shirt and laughs when Alex distracts him by catching his hands to kiss them after every button.

They are ridiculous.

They are lovely.

Danny rolls to his stomach and reaches for the bedside table, pulling the drawer free to find the condoms and lube. Alex hardly lets him move, even when Danny laughs and asks him for just a moment more. Shedding his shirt, he presses back a moment later, kissing the back of Danny’s neck, down the notches of his spine, every one kissed, every hollow between them. His hands span over Danny’s ribs and damn near circle his waist before gliding down to his hips.

He reaches beneath to unfasten Danny’s jeans, and careful fingers slip the well-worn fabric free when Danny bends his back deeper. Danny moans against the mattress when Alex’s progression down the curve of his back continues, hesitating just over the cleft of his ass with a warm breath.

“Can I?” Alex asks, and Danny laughs again, shaking his head.

“God, I wish you would.”

Danny splays his legs as much as he can, jeans caught around them. Alex’s lips raise his hips higher from the bed, presenting himself and held in place all at once by Alex’s hands around his thighs. Danny has licked Alex open countless times, but never the other way around. Lube and condom both slip from his hands as he grips the sheets beneath his fingers instead when Alex nuzzles his tailbone and touches a feather-soft kiss lower still.

Alex takes his time, a slow and gentle discovery. He has felt this but never given it, he has watched Danny succumb entirely to pleasure when Alex sucked his cock but never from this. Not until now, when Alex gently spreads Danny’s cheeks and kisses the delicate thin skin of his hole. Once, again, until Danny clenches tight and relaxes again and presses his chest to the pillow, slipping one hand down to stroke himself as Alex tentatively draws his tongue over his hole next.

It’s been a long time since someone ate him out at all, let alone like this. The inexperience adds to the pleasure for Danny, as it always does with Alex. He feels every tremor and every shift, every slip of slick tongue just against his skin but never penetrating him, not yet.

He could come from this alone.

He has, many times, with others. At parties, not knowing whose tongue was in his ass and whose around his cock and uncaring entirely because it felt so fucking good. In bed with another man, panting into the pillow much as he does now as he’s spread and devoured. It’s good. It’s so good.

There are beats in their rhythm where there is no touch at all beyond Alex’s hands holding him wide and the soft breath of his mouth near. What he’s thinking as he lets his gaze linger on Danny like this, Danny can’t imagine. It doesn’t matter. It’s exhilarating to be seen this way, the exposure intoxicating, Alex’s careful curiosity enough to dizzy him.

And then he touches again and Danny trembles. Fist squeezing firm around his cock in little tugs, timed to the circling of Alex’s tongue around his hole, mirroring the same motions Danny has done to him so many times before. The tip of his tongue, tracing the wrinkled rim of his clenching muscle. The flat of it stroked firm. A kiss, sucking softly, that pulls Danny’s body so tight with pleasure that even his socked toes curl hard.

He draws a breath to ask, to guide, but the words falter and fall into a moan when Alex licks hard and long against him. From the tender skin behind his balls nearly to his tailbone, leaving a strip of heat that cools beneath his breath. Alex does it again and Danny buries his face against the bed, voice pitching higher in little jerks of too-short breath. The sound and pressure of another kiss forces him to stop stroking himself, gripping his cock just beneath the head to keep his orgasm as a tense, twitching heat low in his belly.

“Alex, please,” he begs, laughs, moans into the pillow. His hand clenches and relaxes over and over against the sheets at his side, and as Alex takes his hand to hold it, Danny shivers from that simple contact alone.

The little bottle of lube is clicked open, fingers slicked and slipped into Danny as he tries to catch his breath. So often he didn’t use lube, he didn’t need to or didn’t want to; with Alex he has always made sure to make him comfortable. This same consideration shown him makes his chest swell and a lump form in his throat. It’s so gentle, so deliberately gentle.

When Alex rips open the condom packet, Danny squirms, trying to push his pants lower down his thighs, but Alex doesn’t let him, holding him trapped in a tangle of denim and limbs. It’s oddly hot, half-dressed with fingers in his ass, Alex breathing against his back when he leans closer, teasing just the tip of his cock against Danny’s slick opening as he rolls the condom on fully.

“I need you,” Danny whispers, turning his head enough to catch the corner of his mouth against Alex’s lips. Alex kisses him back clumsily, energetic squeezes wherever he can reach. His cheeks are flushed, a dusky rose spread beneath his eyes. It’s the last thing Danny sees before his eyes roll closed as blunt pressure pushes against his opening.

He holds himself steady, fingers circled around the base of his cock as he guides it into the wet and welcome heat of Danny’s body. Cheek against Danny’s shoulder, Alex holds himself above him with a hand on the bed. The other settles to the side when his cock is held fast by Danny, clenching tight enough around him to tear a shuddering moan from Alex, spilled against Danny’s skin.

“I love you,” gasps Alex, pressing a palm over Danny’s heart, curling fingers against his hairless chest. He hunches closer over him, chest to back, and with little thrusts rocks himself deeper, further into the trembling form of the only person he’s ever loved.

The only person who’s ever really loved him.

“Oh,” he moans, “I love you, Danny.”

And when Danny pushes himself back, Alex shoves harder in return, burying himself with a groan. Another jolt of hips jerks the bed beneath them. Danny laughs, and it sounds like a sob. He blinks away tears, and with shaking fingers brings Alex’s fingers to his mouth to let him feel his smile.

They won’t last long, either of them, Danny already so close his hand is slick where he tries to hold himself back. He nuzzles and draws his face deliberately over and over the palm of Alex’s hand. He pants his name, he whimpers his pleasure, he arches his back deeper to feel Alex all the way to the hilt, enough to feel his balls slap softly against his ass.

Then Alex slows, drawing out the pleasure for both of them, pressing hot kisses against Danny’s back, letting his hands skim tickling down his sides to hold his hips steady. He wishes he had kept Danny on his back so he could see him, so he could see the rapture that relaxes his features when he reaches climax, the pleasure that shivers and shudders through him after every orgasm.

Danny feels everything so entirely, a conduit for every sensation and emotion and passing feeling. He feels everything Alex feels, allows that to become a feedback loop for himself. Pleasure, pain, frustration, elation - everything. Danny is everything, all at once.

In Danny are whole universes that Alex has yet to explore. In Danny exist manifolds of potential that Alex wants to experience. Every breath is remarkable. Every moan they share unlikely. Every movement manifests energy with such intensity that it overwhelms Alex to his very particles, until it expands him outward with a deep gasp.

He slides free and kisses Danny’s back when his voice pitches to a fussy whine against the sheets. He works Danny’s jeans off his legs, grasping a skinny ankle to turn him gently to his back. It’s only a moment apart before Alex presses in again, held in the comfortable confines of Danny’s arms and legs and lips, but it may has well have been lifetimes for how relieved they are to join together again.

Danny’s toes press into the sheets, splayed, arching his foot and calves to beautiful curves as he rocks against Alex with every thrust, every push. He holds Alex close so they’re chest to chest, lips brushing but not pressing together as they try to catch their breath. His hands slip between the damp strands of Alex’s hair, caressing him, holding him, hushing him when Alex’s whimpers of need grow louder in his pleasure.

He is so beautiful.

“God, you feel good,” Danny whispers. He curls one arm beneath Alex’s and over his shoulder, holding him steady as he clenches and turns his hips to tug Alex closer and closer to release. “So fucking good, Alex, shit.”

“You,” Alex manages, but nothing more than that before he laughs, he gasps, he pushes deep and his throat clicks in the shuddering silence of his orgasm. He needs say nothing more. Danny is enough. Danny is everything.

When his voice returns it’s with a grunt of a breath held so long his sides heave with the weight of air in them again. Smearing kisses against Danny’s cheek, his mouth, twisting their lips and tongues together, Alex slips free, still hard, and shoves clumsy, breathless kisses down the length of Danny’s skinny body. He wriggles free, damp with sweat, from Danny’s clutching fingers. He kisses his stomach as Danny laughs.

Holding his thighs apart, Alex takes Danny’s cock between his lips and sucks deep.

Danny’s feet slip on the bed, his hands come up to press to his face and he moans, low and deep, as he comes between Alex’s slick lips. It’s too much all at once, too overwhelming, and Danny feels himself float in a space between here and there, now and then, up and down. He sees stars and his breathing hitches, and when he slips his hands down his body to curl in Alex’s hair, he laughs.

He laughs until tears come to his eyes again and he bites his lip. He laughs even as he kisses Alex again, holding him close and trembling beneath him. He tastes himself, he tastes Alex and their mingled breath.

“I found you,” he manages, calming his breath and holding Alex’s face in his hands. “I found you.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Alex licks the tea from his bottom lip and shakes his head, watching as Danny’s ash falls from his cigarette and splits against the edge of the table, falling to pieces that scatter in the gentle morning breeze._
> 
> _“It’s done.”_

Freshly showered, muscles still twitching from his run, Alex sits in his towel across from Danny and tries to explain again, when his mind is clearest and Danny’s is most receptive. For weeks Alex has been bent over his computer, little said during his working hours, ensconced deeply in numbers that Danny watches form from over his shoulder.

“You said I was a bad control,” Alex says. “I am. I couldn’t quantify every possible behavior and variation in human behavior. I hardly know when you’re making a joke.”

“You’re getting better at it,” Danny tells him, kindly, murmuring around the filter of his cigarette. They’ve pulled the table out onto the terrace for breakfast, and Danny sits with both feet against his chair and his knees against his chest.

“I’m too linear. No, not a line, alone - a single point. You’re another singular point, and between us a connection. Supersymmetry, two particles that balance the other’s existence out, differing only in certain ways but held together with quantum energies. From the moment we came into consciousness, through every possible decision we might have made and the ones we did, we’re here. We found each other. The odds against that are enormous, a single different choice at any point would have altered potentially everything…”

“Do you think that we’d have looked for each other?” Danny asks, ashing his cigarette. “If we hadn’t found each other then. If our particles match like that, held together but... at a distance.”

Alex smiles a little, the flow of his thoughts held for a moment as he watches Danny across from him. “Hadn’t we been? You with others. Myself alone. Were we comfortable before we brought our fields closer together, or were we strained, vibrating at discordant frequencies?”

Danny touches his thumb to the end of his cigarette and flicks it gently over and over, not quite ashing it, but giving his hands something to do. He smiles after a moment and turns his head to look out over the street below, mostly quiet but for the occasional jogger or someone walking their dog. It’s a Tuesday, leaning towards cooler weather, and Danny is comfortably sleepy as he nurses his coffee.

“You told me once you didn’t believe in soul mates,” he reminds Alex quietly, but it’s hardly accusatory. “We were having a bonfire on the beach, do you remember?”

“Yes,” Alex laughs, ducking his head. “I do. I told you -”

“You thought it was stupid, the idea that there is someone singular for you, just one. The probabilities stacked up against it. God, I was so mad at you that night,” Danny laughs. “But you were really saying the same thing, weren’t you, as I was? Just in different terms?”

“Yes,” Alex says again, brow creased not with the upset that darkened his features when they spoke of this beside the fire, but with consideration. “I think there are an infinite number of ways in which we’d never have found the other. I don’t think that our meeting was predestined. But I think, had we not come together as we did, we would have continued to be unhappy.”

“We saw that there was something wrong, in the other,” Danny allows. He draws a breath, and laughs softly before taking another drag, smoke infusing his words. “It got better, didn’t it? When we found each other.”

“Much,” Alex agrees, watching as Danny’s eyes draw up in pleasure. “You knew before I did. We simply worded it differently. But the concept is the same, and you knew. I was too stubborn to see it.”

“Not stubborn. Speaking another language, as if I’d tried to say it in - in Cambodian.” Alex draws a breath and Danny laughs before he can speak. “Of course you do.”

“Only a little,” smiles Alex, finishing his eggs and gently daubing his mouth with a napkin. “But the algorithm, it was fatalistic. The assumption that everything is predetermined and can be measured by past behavior. Your being here, my meeting you - that isn’t fate. It’s chance. Each moment one out of infinite possibilities.”

“Infinite universes?” Danny asks, brow lifting. Alex searches his eyes and leaves the multiverse theories at rest. He knows how Danny dislikes them, even if it’s irrational to feel that way.

“I could determine that our meeting is unlikely. It happened anyway. Everything we’ve been doing with the algorithm - that I’ve been doing,” he corrects, “has been stripping away the potential for chance and probability. The errors you’ve found…”

“Were right, weren’t they,” Danny grins, delighting in his quiet triumph.

“Yes. Well, no, but yes,” muses Alex. “We can measure likelihoods. Statistical chances of a statement being true or false, through complementary events and conditional probability sourced from past behaviors. We can get close, closer than any other measure that presently exists, but we cannot know with absolute certainty. We have to allow for a margin of error.”

“Like dropping my phone on the bridge.”

“Like taking a different path to run than I ever normally did.”

“How much longer?”

Alex licks the tea from his bottom lip and shakes his head, watching as Danny’s ash falls from his cigarette and splits against the edge of the table, falling to pieces that scatter in the gentle morning breeze. “It’s done.”

Danny blinks. “It’s done?”

“As much as it can be,” Alex shrugs. “We can run a few more tests but… it works. Everything for which we can account, allowing for necessary imperfections...”

“It’s done,” Danny laughs, slipping his feet to the ground and flicking his cigarette over the balcony with a grin. The elation sparks between them, that same nervous energy that had brought them together in the first place, the tentative waiting and needing and hoping that neither were wrong. Knowing if they didn’t go for it, if they didn’t ask, if they didn’t try, they wouldn’t know.

Danny brings his hand to his face and chews the side of his thumb pensively. “How do you feel?”

It’s a hard question for Alex, always. He knows that the correct default answer is ‘fine’. He knows that his chest is a little tight and that even still, his breath moves a little easier through him. Danny waits, unhurried and remarkable in his patience.

Remarkable in more ways than Alex could ever quantify.

“It doesn’t really change anything, does it?” He finally says. “Retroactively, it can’t. It’s irrational to think that it would, even in a nonlinear understanding of chronology…”

Danny slowly lifts his fingers, a motion to which Alex has become accustomed, a gentle interruption to his thoughts when they begin to unspool in an untenable way. Alex nods, once, and gathers his words back against himself before giving his feelings shape again.

“I imagined that it would make me feel better. After what they did. What she did. It doesn’t.” He draws a breath, satisfied with that, and when he sighs long, he smiles a little. “Relieved, though. I feel relieved. And I’m uncertain, outside of running more tests, with how to spend the rest of my day.” He pauses, and after a moment asks, “How do you feel?”

Danny considers the question as thoroughly and licks his lips when he drops his hand again. “Happy,” he says after a pause. “For you. For your life’s work being realized. I don’t know what to do with myself either.” He wriggles a little in his seat and shifts to put his feet up against Alex’s towel-clad thighs.

“I think there is only one way to make yourself feel better about past mistakes, yours or other’s. By proving wrong what they predicted for you. My father hurt me, beat me, told me I was good for nothing, a mistake. But here I am, I made my way. And I’m good for you.” He smiles then, a little wider. “You were lied to and hurt, and yet in that, in all their lies, you have found not truths, not twistings of words to make them legitimate, you found a way out. You found a way to illegitimize all of their gaslighting and cruelty, all of their pushing and irrational obsession. We have become, Alex, the people we were always meant to be. That is how we beat the history that made us. That is how we move on to make the future we want.”

Alex’s hands settle to Danny’s feet, thumbs working in steady strokes against the base of one. His quiet is curious, and Danny watches the gentle flickers of thought that cross his features. But the hum, the endless droning whir of the last few months isn’t there. Whether he’s no longer seeking counterpoints - _for the sake of argument_ \- or that there simply aren’t any to be found isn’t clear.

But his peace is, radiant in the easy smile that Alex lifts to him.

“We could go to the museum. There’s one for contemporary art, and one for classic.”

“We could,” Danny agrees, a hand against his mouth when he can’t ease his grin.

“We could go out to lunch.”

“We could do that, too.”

“Anything,” Alex says, a little breathless as he sighs, laughing. “Anything.”

“We could dance naked in the living room,” Danny suggests next, and Alex laughs harder.

“Why?”

“Why not?” Danny squirms his feet free and pushes up to stand from the table, stepping back into the flat and crooking his finger at Alex for him to follow. “We could bake and fill the house with the smell of pastries and bread.”

Danny teases the hem of his shirt up and lets it fall as he steps further into the house. When Alex follows, he drops his arms behind his back and yanks it off, letting it fall to the floor.

Alex takes him in, gaze following the lines of his body when Danny twists his hips a little, though there’s no music playing. Towel held around his waist, Alex laughs as Danny’s fingers settle to the waistband of his sleep pants - Alex’s pants, already hanging low.

“I don’t know how to bake.”

“I can teach you,” Danny offers.

“We could,” Alex begins, drawing a breath as the possibilities dizzy him, “we could go to the park. Not to run, but maybe to read. Or talk.”

“Lying in the grass together.”

“Yes,” Alex says, catching Danny by his waist as he dances by and reeling him close. “Or take a train to the beach, while it’s still warm enough that we won’t be uncomfortable.”

“Drink tea from a thermos and wrap ourselves in a heavy woolen throw when the wind picks up,” Danny laughs, reaching back to loosen the towel around Alex’s hips and smiling when he feels it pool around their feet.

“We could go -”

“To Europe,” Danny says. “See Rome.”

“Or Asia and Africa to see the endless skies.”

“Anything,” Danny laughs again, turning in Alex’s arms and kissing him. “Anything. As long as it’s with you.”

Alex’s embrace pulls Danny to his toes, and he laughs against his mouth as the trousers slip from Danny’s hips and he steps out of them, bare. Their kiss parts their lips and draws them together again, nuzzling the other’s cheek, chaste kisses and longer ones, brows pressed together. When they sigh, together, it’s with greater relief than a job being completed. It’s freedom, an allowance for their exceptional existences, and a forgiveness of their pasts.

“I would have ached for you,” Alex whispers. “For this, for my entire life if we hadn’t found each other. I wouldn’t have known why, just as I didn’t before, but the sensation would be there all the same.”

Against his mouth, Danny confesses in a kiss. He knows. He knows the ache like a limb is missing, like there are spaces that should be filled. He knows that no one in his life has ever relieved those feelings so entirely.

Even when he’s difficult.

Even when he’s stubborn.

“You’re starting to speak my language,” Danny murmurs, grinning.

Alex opens his eyes a little, brow raised. “Cambodian?”

How they dress again is a mystery, tangled all the while in kisses and grabbing hands. They plan for endless adventures. Travel and relaxing on beaches far away, covered in white sand and black, pebbles and scoria. They consider the museums they could see, the galleries and operas they could visit, to see if they enjoy them, because neither have ever been. They think of riding horses and taking hours-long train rides through exquisite countryside. They dress and wind light scarves around the other’s throat as they argue over where to go to eat, now, right now, even though they’ve had breakfast and don’t need the food.

Coffee.

Coffee and cake.

Just cake.

Maybe tea?

Beer.

Too early for beer.

Anything. In the end, they decide on anything.

“Don’t you start,” Danny laughs from the door, bouncing on one foot as he ties the laces of his other boot, cheeks flushed from delight and youthful vigor as he looks at Alex opening up his computer again. “Not now. Wait until we get home at least.”

“I only need to do -”

“One more thing, I know.” Danny makes a startled sound as he nearly loses his balance, catching himself against the door frame. “And you know that one more thing is never one more thing,” he grins.

Alex considers the absolute truth of Danny’s words, and that at the same time, this time, in this particular instance, they’re false. The paradox tugs a smile, small, and Alex sets his fingers to the keys as Danny groans, and laughs again. “One last thing,” Alex says instead, as Danny pushes off the door to step back and light a cigarette.

On the screen, Alex opens an email. He’s spoken to no one since they arrived, but his network is secure. Even if they trace them to Croatia, there’s nothing they’ll be able to do about it.

Even if Alex showed up at the doorstep of the SIS building, there is nothing they can do about it.

Not after he pastes his synopsis and report on the algorithm into the body of the email. Not after he addresses it to Marcus, at Cambridge, and other academics he’s found from a wide array of fields - sociology and computer science, mathematics and physics. Not after he adds in newspapers. Television stations. Anyone. Everyone.

He hesitates only when he selects the algorithm’s document, and watches it attach to the missive. It’s already uploading to countless sites. It will be uploaded to countless more. Replicated again and again, in endless fractal expansion. Some of the documents will be opened. Some will not. Some branches of its spread will cut short. Others will flourish.

What the world will do with this, Alex doesn’t know. He can’t predict that, nor how many lives may be changed or saved or ruined by its existence. What he knows is that this tool isn’t his to keep, nor his to share selectively. What he knows is that this is the only way in which he and Danny will no longer be targets, and for their work - together, theirs - to be seen.

Alex clicks send, and lowers the computer screen.

In infinite manifold universes over this one, in all of their infinite possibilities, there will be every potential outcome. He could never predict them all, and even if he could, none of those realities matter as much to Alex as the one waiting for him just outside the door.

“Done?” Danny asks, and Alex returns his smile.

“Done.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading through our first London Spy story! Danny's currently having another adventure entirely in [Equanimity](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5608648), but never fear if crossovers aren't your thing - we've got a handful of timestamps set within the Supersymmetry verse that we'll be sharing with you every Tuesday until we run out of them. Thank you again, for reading and sharing and all your lovely comments! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Like what we're working on? Check out our [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/wwhiskeyandbloodd?ty=h) for pre-release chapters, original works, the chance to chat with us and sit in on our writing, or maybe pledge to have us write you a story every month!


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